


Cruel Summer

by actuallymaxie



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Closeted Character, Drug Use, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix-It, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-08 01:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20827007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actuallymaxie/pseuds/actuallymaxie
Summary: Richie used to call it an itch. Eddie makes him feel like it’s something else. It’s one thing to feel it. It’s something else to be able to say it out loud.Or: Eddie doesn’t die. That doesn’t mean there’s a happily ever after. Not right away, at least.





	1. Cornelia Street

Richie used to call it an itch. 

He’d be walking down the street and see some asthmatic kid take a puff of their inhaler, and he’d feel it. He’d be at the far end of a bar nursing the tail end of a double shot of whisky and hear a laugh just this side of familiar, and he’d feel it. He’d see a random person on the street with their arm in a cast, and he’d feel it. 

It’s not something he thinks about if he can help it. The itch makes him feel unsettled. It encourages him to order another drink even if he’s had enough; it makes anything that might numb him worth the headache in the morning. He doesn’t like to think about the itch. He doesn’t like to think about anything. That’s why having someone else wrote his jokes is so appealing. 

But the itch never really goes away. It triggers his gag reflex when his phone lights up with a number from Derry, Maine. It writhes in his chest as the neon buzz of Jade of the Orient lights up his glasses. It splits him from shaft to sternum the moment he sees him again. 

He remembers Eddie all at once. Where previously there had been memories of himself riding a bike, playing an arcade game, swimming in dirty water in nothing but his tightie-wighties, now there are memories of him doing all of these things with a tiny brunette all but attached to his hip - but that’s not exactly right either, he thinks, wondering breathlessly at the man staring back at him from across the dimly lot banquet room. That boy had never been attached to his hip. He’d been attached to his - he’d always been attached to Eddie. 

Eddie looks exactly like Richie might’ve imagined him as an adult. His shoulders are hunched under a clean, plain polo shirt and cardigan. Richie looks him up and down and expects to see his knobby knees somewhere between old athletic shorts and too-tall tube socks, but the adult version of Eddie wears basic and casual blue jeans and sensible Nike sneakers. He’s awkward and cute, and he’s everything Richie once (not loved, don’t say loved, this is Eddie so it isn’t love) knew. Richie swallows hard. Eddie smiles. 

It’s easy to jibe at each other, Richie realizes. The more jokes he makes - so Eddie, you got married? To a woman? - the more the itch fades. It’s like the itch wasn’t an itch at all, but a hole in his very self that kept trying to scab over and heal, but he kept picking it open and open and open and now that the hole is filled, it doesn’t itch so badly anymore. It makes him sweaty and anxious to think about how easily Eddie filled that hole, but - but he downs another shot and grips Eddie’s hand hard in his and pretends to give him a shot at winning at arm wrestling. Eddie’s hand is warm and a little sweaty and he remembers the last time he held it - tried to hold it, but it was covered in thick plaster and grime. Eddie cackles even as he loses and Richie remembers all at once how full his heart feels when Eddie laughs; it’s a feeling of true satisfaction that he never feels when he’s in front of an audience. Eddie shrieks and calls him a motherfucker and everyone around them laughs, and, in that moment, Richie can’t remember the last time he felt joy like this. 

It doesn’t last. His fortune cookie is fucking looking at him and Eddie’s is flapping around, fucking airborne and - 

“Eddie,” he gasps before he can help himself, but no one notices because they’re so busy batting away winged creepy baby faces and fucked up crawling baby birds. His name tastes like vanilla ice cream and the chemical burst of inhaler vapor and fucking gray water. Ben swats at the little monster when it dives toward Eddie’s face. Mike’s screaming. Bev’s screaming. And everything just goes more and more wrong. 

The worst of it is that he almost - almost - convinces Eddie to leave with him. Leaving is surely the only thing that they should be doing, and yet they stay. They all stay. Richie almost leaves on his own, but the itch overwhelms him. He can leave, just get in his car and just go - but he thinks about his tiny apartment, all those nights spent alone and sad and scared and fighting against that infernal itch in his chest. He hasn’t felt the itch in the two days he’s spent in Derry, but he recognizes the itch now for what it really is. It’s fear, harsh and paralyzing. But not fear of a clown. 

“I know your secret,” that fucking clown sing-songs into his ears (always, always singing), in his chest. “Your dirty little secret!” 

He wants to cry. He doesn’t. Instead, his heart seizes in his chest even as the courage dissipates. 

“Hey, fuckface!” he cries. That horrible, painted face swivels toward him. He doesn’t breathe, just shouts: “you want to play truth or dare? Here’s the truth! You’re a sloppy bitch!” He leans down just enough to grab a stone off of the ground. It heaves Mike away from him like he’s nothing, and Richie grips the rock in his hand like it’s the only thing tethering him to this world. This is just another rock war, he tells himself, gripping the stone tightly in his sweaty palm. He won the last one. This is kid stuff. Yeah, right. “Yeah, that’s right! Let’s dance! Yippee-kay-yay, mother -“

Everything is very dark and very still all at once. That initial flash of the brightest light he’s ever seen, and then he’s staring into the deadlights. Everything stops and he’s shrouded in oppressive darkness. He can’t feel his hands or feet. He can’t move at all. Even thinking is too hard, so he just drifts. And he sees. 

He sees Bill’s bloated body. His clothes are sopping wet. His lips are blue, his skin as white as Pennywise’s. Drowned. He’s lying deathly still and his colorless eyes see nothing. Richie sees Ben next, his throat slashed ear to ear. Bev, blood soaked, spine twisted grotesquely. Mike with his face bashed in, his jaw half unhinged. Then there’s Eddie. Eddie. 

Eddie’s got a hole in his chest the size of a basketball. There’s blood on his chin and his chest and his body is so still. Richie has never seen him so still. He wants to scream and cry and run to him, but he can’t. He can only stare, and Eddie’s lifeless eyes stare unblinkingly back. Not Eddie, he thinks desperately. Not Eddie. Anyone but Eddie. 

The next thing he remembers is pain in his legs and Pennywise roaring in his ears. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. His heart hammers and his eyes roam wildly and he hears -

“Richie! Rich! Wake up!” Hands grasp his shoulders hard and he struggles to force his eyes to focus on anything. Eddie’s face floats into his line of sight. His head throbs and he can’t get his brain to catch up. “Hey! Yeah, there he is! Buddy, Richie, listen, I think I got him, man. I think I killed It. I did! I think I killed It for real -“

Richie marvels up at Eddie’s excited face. His body thrums with the after effects of looking into the deadlights, but he’s relieved. Eddie isn’t dead. He’s here, his hands warm and tight on his arms, and he’s smiling. He’s halfway through a laugh when one of Pennywise’s talons spears through him. 

“No!” Richie cries as hot blood splatters his face. “Eddie!”

Eddie’s hands fumble against the talon. “Richie,” he whimpers. Blood oozes out of his mouth, thick and almost black in the blue glow of the deadlights. “Richie.”

Richie screams as Eddie is yanked away. Pennywise is laughing. Bill is screaming. “Eddie,” he whispers thickly. Then Eddie’s body is tossed across the cavern carelessly, and Richie can hear every thump his body makes as it rolls away and away and away until finally coming to a stop somewhere. 

They all run. Richie can’t see what the others are doing in the darkness of the cave, but he knows they all have the same destination in mind. Eddie is lying face down at the bottom of a small cave. Ben reaches him first and gingerly turns him over. Richie can only stare for a moment at the gaping hole in his chest - the same hole that he saw not moments ago when he was staring into the deadlights. He thinks about Beverly and how she knows how all of them die, and he wonders briefly if she knew this was coming and why she didn’t say anything. But he doesn’t have it in him to be angry or upset with Beverly, not now. He just rips off his jacket and shoves it against Eddie’s gaping chest and tries desperately to stem the bleeding. He’s not used to blood, doesn’t know if he’s helping or hurting, only knows first aid based off of old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and ER. He is utterly helpless and hopeless, but he can’t let Eddie just lay there and die. 

“Come out and play!” Pennywise crows from above them. Richie can hear rocks crumbling as he tried to widen the entry enough to fit his huge, monstrous body into their tiny shelter. 

“Guys, he’s hurt really bad. We gotta get him out of here,” Richie hears himself say. He doesn’t feel all there, like part of him is still - not floating, don’t say floating - 

Eddie is looking straight up at him. His bloody hand comes up to grasp at Richie’s. “I almost killed him. The leper. My hands were on his throat. I... could feel him choking.” Eddie stops talking for a moment, struggling to suck in breath. Richie doesn’t ease the pressure off of his chest. Eddie gasps, “I made him small. He seemed... so weak.”

The others have a plan that Richie is only less than half a part of. He can’t tear his eyes away from Eddie, who is growing paler and paler at each passing second. He tries not to think about how Eddie’s paleness is due to how much of his blood is currently on Richie’s face and hands. They move him from the semi-safety of the tiny cave, and their friends run off to confront It, but Richie stays by Eddie’s side. He stares down at the man who he loved and forgot and loved again and struggles to keep his organs all inside. 

“Richie,” Eddie whispers breathlessly. “I gotta tell you something.” 

Richie leans in eagerly. His heart threatens to burst in his chest. This isn’t the way he wanted it, never ever the way he imagined it going, but he tastes “I love you, too” on his tongue. 

“What? What’s up, buddy?” he whispers. Eddie swallows hard. 

“I fucked your mother,” he mumbles, then laughs. Blood dribbles thickly down his chin, and Richie knows he’s going to die. 

Pennywise shrinks and shrinks and tries to crawl away. Richie watches Eddie’s grow dimmer and dimmer. Eddie smiles weakly up at him. Rage tears through the phantom itch in Richie’s chest. He clasps Eddie’s hands over his jacket and runs toward that fucking clown that ruined him, ruined his life, hurt his best friends. The bloody talon that hurt Eddie swipes weakly at Mike. Richie tears off his fucking taloned arm and tosses it away like it’s nothing because it is now. It dealt the killing blow, but it’s not It’s anymore, and that’s the only thing Richie can do for Eddie in that moment. 

Relief is a brief reprieve when Pennywise is dead. He allows himself half a minute to process that its over, he’s okay, he safe, before he turns back to the most important issue in the room. “Eddie,” he whispers, like a prayer. He runs to him, to his still and lifeless body at the far end of the cavern. His eyes are open, but he’s not there. Richie knows. They all know. He touches Eddie’s cheek. “We got Pennywise, man.”

Eddie doesn’t move or respond. Richie can feel his face crumble and is glad that his friends are standing behind him and can’t see. He grips the back of Eddie’s head and crowds him closer. Eddie’s hair is soft against his fingers. 

“Richie -“

“He’s alright,” Richie barks. He turns to look at them. They’re crying. He’s not. “He’s just hurt. We’ve got to get him out of here. Ben?” He asks desperately when no one moves. Ben is the strongest and most fit of all of them. He has to help. 

“Richie,” Bev sobs. He sucks in a sharp breath because he knows what she’s going to say. 

“What?” he snaps at her. 

“Honey, he’s dead,” she whispers. 

The cavern is collapsing around them. He collapses against Eddie. He clutches his still body against him as hard as he can, even as hands pry him away. He fights them, but he was never strong or fit even in his glory days, and he’s no match against them now as a forty year old functioning alcoholic either. He holds Eddie’s body closer than he’s ever dared for as long as he can, and he knows he’s screaming but can’t make out the words. He fights them every step of the way but then sees Ben heave Eddie’s much smaller body over his broad shoulders and - and maybe it’s enough as long as he’s out of this horrible place, so he lets Bill and Mike force him bodily back to Neibolt Street. 

Ben lays Eddie down on the sidewalk. Richie crawls over to him and screams and cries into his neck, and his friends let him. He does put up a fight when they pull him away again, but he recognizes the flashing red lights of the ambulance and the uniforms on the men who are touching Eddie’s body. They put a mask over his face. Richie sags back against Ben, and another EMT comes over and wraps him up in a shock blanket. 

He doesn’t know what happens next. He blacks out. He doesn’t think he made it to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, but he doesn’t know for sure. He’s on a cot when he comes to, and Bev is next to him, but he doesn’t know where anyone else is. He recognizes the sterile whiteness of a hospital, recognizes that he’s not wearing his bloody and dirty clothes anymore and neither is Bev, but doesn’t know how much time has gone by or even if they’re still in Derry. She’s wearing a plain grey sweatshirt and sweatpants. He’s in a hospital gown. Her hand is curled delicately around his. He turns to her, and she runs her free hand over his hair so gently that it almost brings tears to his eyes. 

“Hi,” she breathes. Her fingernails scratch gently against his scalp, soothing. “You’re awake. How are you feeling?”

Richie breathes. The tears come after all. “Eddie,” he chokes. 

“Oh, Richie,” Bev begins. His face crumples. 

“Where’s Eddie?” He sobs. She curls her body over him, around his head protectively, as if she could protect him from some outside pain, but his pain wasn’t coming from outside. His chest felt like it had been ripped in two, and maybe, in a way, it had. “Where’s Eddie?” He begs, and he tries to pull himself away from her so he can get out of the cot and find him himself. She shushes him gently and presses him back to his pillow. 

“He’s in surgery,” she says, and she’s crying too. 

“Surgery?” He repeats numbly. Surgery doesn’t make sense. No one does surgery on a dead person. Dead person surgery is just autopsy, but Bev didn’t say autopsy. 

“He’s alive,” she whispers, as if her saying it at full volume might shatter the illusion. “They think they can save him, Rich.”

The nurse doesn’t let him leave his cot, never mind his room. He wants to check himself out against medical advice so he can sit with everyone else in the waiting room and be there when Eddie makes it out of surgery, but he lets Beverly convince him to stay overnight. He’s not injured, he doesn’t think, but Bev seems worried. He wonders vaguely if he’s on some kind of suicide watch. He doesn’t ask, but he also can’t sleep, so the nurse dopes him up enough to get at least a little bit of rest. In his dreams, he stares into Eddie’s lifeless eyes and Eddie stares back. 

Richie wakes up with the itch. He checks himself out and changes into clothes that Bill brought him back from the inn, then sits with his friends in the waiting room until Eddie is cleared for visitors. He can’t have many for any meaningful amount of time, but Richie feels the nagging itch until it’s finally his turn.

He goes last. He tugs on sterile gloves and a face mask, and he sits quietly at Eddie’s bedside for a full minute, just staring down at his sleeping face. He takes in the monitors and machines around him and thinks about the doctor who came to speak to them. He’s not out of the woods, but they’re optimistic. He’s probably going to be okay. If he wakes up, he’s going to be okay. He presses his palm against Eddie’s and wishes they didn’t have a layer of plastic between them. 

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” he whispers. He presses the back of Eddie’s hand to his lips, which are covered in the flimsy paper hospital-issued face mask. He kisses Eddie’s knuckles. “It should have been me. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have left you alone. If I’d stayed with you, I could’ve... I’m sorry.”

I could’ve kept you alive, he thinks, I shouldn’t have left you. Eddie doesn’t respond because Eddie isn’t conscious. Richie lets himself cry a little because he’s here and hidden away from anyone who would judge him. He’s not a cryer, generally, but being back in Derry and being back with Eddie seems to have broken his crybaby bone. He hunches over his best friend, presses his forehead against his shoulder. 

“I love you,” he tells him, both because it’s true and because he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get another chance. “I love you, and I’ve always loved you, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for so much, but especially for not saying it sooner. I’m sorry. I love you. Please don’t leave me, Eddie. Please. You can’t leave me. Not when I just got you back. Eddie, please. I love you.”

Richie cries a while. He doesn’t know when Eddie wakes up. They let him stay at his bedside longer than they let anyone else. He knows and doesn’t know why. He won’t say it out loud or to himself. But the fact if the matter is, he’s still with Eddie when Eddie finally opens his bleary eyes. He calls the doctors in, lets them do their business. He’s okay. It’s going to be a long and difficult road to recovery. He’s going to need help. He’s going to need support. Richie understands all of this, but he also feels the itch again, more insistent than ever. The fear.

He wants to stay at Eddie’s bedside, help him through recovery and physical therapy, hold his hand and tell him he loves him. Instead, he goes back to the inn. He packs what’s left to be packed, gets into his car, and goes home. Eddie will be okay, he tells himself, because Eddie is surrounded by people who care about him and will do whatever it takes to help him. Richie can’t be one of them. He holds the steering wheel with one hand and presses the other against the itch in his chest and tries to will it away.


	2. The Archer

Richie’s apartment is nice. It’s fine. It’s always suited his every need, anyway. It has a bed to sleep in and a couch for when he doesn’t make it to the bed and a half stocked liquor cabinet and a refrigerator with leftover pizza and beer. He’s felt lonely in it before, but never the kind of lonely he feels when he shuts the door behind himself upon returning from Derry. 

He dumps his bag next to the couch and goes to the kitchen to pour himself a shot, and then another for good measure. The alcohol settles his jittery nerves and soothes the itch. He sits down on the sofa and cracks a beer, then decides it’s probably time he checked his phone. He’s been out of Derry for a full day. He’s as far away as he can possibly be. And he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about Eddie, or any of them really. Especially Eddie. 

He turns his phone on and only has to wait a moment for the notifications to load. He’s got several missed calls and even more texts, mostly from Bev. They’re all mostly the same. Where are you? Where did you go? When are you coming back?

Richie doesn’t answer any of them. He wants to, but he can’t make himself do it. He wants to ask after Eddie. How is he? Has he woken up again? Does he still have that tube down his throat? How long will he be in the hospital? Is he in pain? 

He touches his chest, over his heart. He remembers what it was like in the 27 year gap since the last time he was in Derry. He remembers being a gangly teenager with shaggy hair doing his damndest not to make any eye contact with any boy he met. It got easy to avoid eye contact with the girls too, and then adults. He was labeled the awkward kid, the weird kid. He had ADHD but no doctor could tell his mom why he wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. He could handle being the weird kid. It was much better than the other things they could call him. 

In college, he could fake it. He was still awkward, but he could make it endearing. People thought he was funny again. He could handle being funny. He made himself the butt of every joke, and no one could take that power away from him. He got an agent and took acting classes. He didn’t date, didn’t have very many friends, and he drank a lot. It turned out that human interaction was a big part of stand up comedy. His delivery was good, but his jokes sucked. His agent hired him a writer and encouraged him to make some friends. He tried. Going out drinking with the other people in his acting class was a start. Doing a bump or two of cocaine while he was at it made him all the more personable. 

Having moderate success as a comedian was really more success than he ever expected to have. He called his semi-friendless, wholly-loveless life ‘happiness’ and sometimes even believed that’s what it really was. 

He knew the word but he could never make himself say it, at least not in regards to himself. He’d slept with women, when he could get it up - which wasn’t always, but he could blame over consumption of alcohol on that most days. It gave him an excuse to drink more, too. It wasn’t that he had a problem with gay people or didn’t know any gay people. It was Hollywood. He didn’t pretend to live in a bubble. He just wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t like that. Anyone could ask anyone and they’d all say the same thing: Richie Tozier is loud and funny and weird, but Richie Tozier is not gay.

His phone rings in his hand. It’s Mike. Panic swells in his chest and he feels nauseous. He wants to answer. He wants to know about Eddie. He turns off his phone and goes back to the kitchen to pour himself another shot. 

He calls his manager the next day to let him know he’s home. Jason sounds happy to hear from him. He likes Jason. 

“How was everything back home?” Jason asks. Richie swallows heavily. 

“It was good, yeah. Fine,” he manages to choke out. He feels like puking. Jason pauses before answering. 

“You good? You sound not good,” he says. Jason is nice. He’s also not stupid, which is very annoying, especially in that moment. 

“All good,” he lies. His phone buzzes in his hand, and he pulls it away from his ear to check the screen. It’s an incoming call from Bev. 

“Rich?” Jason’s voice echoes up at him. He stares at Bev’s name and thinks about telling Jason he’ll call him back. 

“Yeah, hey. Sorry. I’m here,” he says instead. 

“Why don’t you come by this afternoon? I wanted to talk to you about Reno,” Jason says. Richie nods. “Rich?”

“Yes, sorry,” he apologizes again. Of course Jason wouldn’t be able to hear him nodding. “Yeah, I’ll come over. What time?”

He hangs up with Jason and looks back at his phone. He’s got new voicemails and texts. He opens the ones from Bill. Bill seems safest. Bill has always seemed safest. The latest message makes his heart catch in his throat. 

**Bill:** It’s okay if you can’t come back. At least let us know you’re okay. 

His lip trembles. He goes back and looks at Ben’s next. 

**Ben:** You ok, buddy? Why did you leave?

Bev’s is the shortest and most accusatory. It’s not like he blames her, but it’s still a punch to the gut.

**Beverly:** You should come back. Eddie’s asking for you. 

Her voicemail is even worse. 

“Richie? I don’t know what’s going on, or why you left, but you can come back. Eddie’s awake and he was asking about you,” she says. Her voice lowers to a whisper. “I don’t... I don’t know how to tell him you already left. You left, didn’t you? Bill went to pick you up at the inn, but your room was empty and your car was gone. No one is upset, though, Rich. You can come back. Just talk to us. You can talk to me about... about anything, Richie. We’re all here for you, no matter what. You know that, don’t you? It’s all okay. You can come back.”

Richie puts his phone down on the coffee table and goes to the bathroom to shower. He stays too long under the hot spray. He thinks about Bev and how she was there when he woke up in the hospital, how she never said anything about how he only asked after Eddie and no one else, how she doesn’t know how to tell Eddie that he’s already gone. He thinks about how he let himself drape his body over Eddie’s in the sewer and refused to leave him behind, and he thinks about how they let him have so much time with Eddie in the hospital even though each of them were only allowed to have brief visits. 

_They know_, he realizes, and the itch seizes his esophagus. He makes it out of the shower in time to puke into the toilet, which is a small blessing, then he dries himself off and gets dressed as quickly as he can. _They know. _ There’s no way they don’t know. “Your dirty little secret!” Pennywise’s taunts echo in his ears. He shoves his feet into his shoes and grabs a sweatshirt to throw on because his jacket is long gone. He needs a new one, but not today. Today, they know, and it has to be dealt with. He grabs his keys and phone and -

He has a voicemail from Eddie. He puts his phone to his ear. 

“Richie,” Eddie’s voice is like a lifeline. He sounds fragile even over the phone, but Richie forces himself to reconcile his voice with being alive and not allow himself to picture how blank his eyes had looked the last time he’d seen them. “Richie, I got a nurse to get me my phone. You’d like the nurse here. She looks like my mom,” he jokes. 

Richie chokes on a sob. He thought the last thing he’d ever hear Eddie say was, “I fucked your mother.” Somehow, this is much worse. 

“No one wants to tell me where you went. I know you’re not dead, you asshole. I bet you already went home. I can’t believe you left. Didn’t even say goodbye or anything. Fuck you got leaving when I was asleep, too. Come back, man. Once a Loser, always a Loser. You know that. So stop being a stupid motherfucker and come sit vigil at my bedside. Asshole,” Eddie chuckles, then breathes softly into the phone. He’s quiet long enough that Richie thinks he might have fallen asleep on the phone. Then Eddie sighs, “Richie,” and the phone disconnects. 

Richie clenches his jaw and wipes tears from his face. He listens to the voicemail two more times, then goes to the kitchen and gets the hammer out of the toolbox under the sink and smashes his phone. He pops in on his landlord on his way out, then drives himself to get a new phone with a new number. He doesn’t want anything from his old phone transferred over, he tells the sales associate. He wants a fresh start. Fuck the Cloud. She just shrugs at him and gets him all set up. 

Jason is at his desk when Richie gets to the office. “Hey,” he says warmly. He stands to shake Richie’s clammy hand. “You look about as good in person as you sounded on the phone. What’s going on?”

“Nothing! Nothing,” he corrects himself in a calmer voice when Jason’s eyebrows shoot yo to his hairline. “Sorry. I just had to get a new phone and I have to move out of my apartment, so I’m a little stressed. Sorry, man.”

“You have to move? Why?” Jason asks. Richie clenches his jaw and tries to think quickly. ‘Because I don’t want any of my friends from middle school to be able to find me again’ is truthful but will definitely raise eyebrows. 

“Fuckin rats, man,” he laughs instead, putting on his stage face and letting his shoulders relax. “Came back to just. Rats all over. I gotta get out of there.”

Jason flinches sympathetically. “Oh, that’s awful, Rich. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Right? First a family emergency and now this,” he jokes. “Richie Tozier, batting a thousand this week.”

“Maybe this isn’t the best time to talk then,” Jason says. Richie shakes his head. 

“No, no. We should talk, actually. I think we should cancel Reno,” he says. 

Jason stares at him. “What?”

“I don’t think I can do it, man,” he says honestly. “I -“ I don’t want anyone to be able to track me down, he wants to say. “I don’t know, man. You saw me at my last gig. I was a mess.”

“That was after you got the call about your family emergency,” Jason protests. “It’s all settled now. Isn’t it? I mean, you’re home, so...”

“Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s settled,” he says. “I’m never going back to Maine again, man. Never book me in Maine.”

“Okay,” Jason says slowly. “I still don’t think you should cancel Reno. It’s almost sold out, Rich. That’s what I wanted to tell you. And I talked to the writers, they have some new material they wanted you to try.”

Richie can’t argue with Jason for long. He pays Jason to know what’s best for him, after all. He keeps the date in Reno, but he convinces Jason to hold off on booking him anything else, at least until he can make sure he’s not going to completely bomb on stage again. Maybe Reno is far enough into the future that his friends won’t be thinking of him anymore by then, he reasons with himself on his drive home. 

He doesn’t have a lot of stuff. He’s not exactly a starving artist, but he’s never cared about owning a ton of shit, either. Within a week, he’s packed and moved to a new apartment in a new neighborhood. It’s actually a lot nicer than his old place, with a guest room and laundry on site, but he doesn’t care that much. He’s basically a brand new man, he reasons. New apartment, new phone number. He’s never been big on social media, and Jason has a guy to post on his Instagram for him, so no one will be able to find him there. No one will be able to find him at all. They might know, but they’ll never find him. 

He completely lets himself go. He barely eats, and he drinks more than he ever has. Jason worries. The few friends he had established in LA give him a wider and wider berth. His nightmares keep him up at night. It’s not always the clown, though a lot of the time it is. The worst are the ones where he’s holding Eddie, back in the sewer, and Eddie’s blood is on his hands and shirt and glasses, and Eddie stares up at him with those lifeless eyes. 

“This is your fault,” the Eddie in his dream says. Richie presses his hand hard against the wound in his friend’s chest and tries to keep as much blood in him as he can. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. 

“He got me because I was trying to protect you,” Eddie says. Richie sobs. 

“I know. I know, Eds. I’m so sorry,” he weeps. 

“And then you just left me. I never would have left you, Richie,” Eddie says. Blood dribbles down his chin. Richie nods. 

“I know,” he repeats. He knows. It’s all he can think about. 

“You’re a coward,” Eddie accuses. Richie weeps and nods. “Fucking coward. How could I ever love someone like you?”

A few months later, Richie bombs Reno. There was never any question in his mind that that would happen. Before the show, he works himself up into such an anxiety attack that he almost passes out. He thinks about going on stage for the first time since Derry and seeing his friends in the crowd. They would be there, watching him and judging him and they’d know, and he can’t take the chance. He gets so fucked up on liquor and coke that they won’t even let him on stage, and some poor employee has to go over the speakers and get booed for him when the show is abruptly cancelled. Richie never finds out if any of he Losers did come to try to confront him or not. In the end, it doesn’t matter. 

Jason drops him as a client, which is not unexpected but still stings. Jason was the only person he really had, he realizes as he stares at the blank wall across from the futon in his apartment. Jason was the only person he had, and he had to pay him to stick around, and even that wasn’t enough of a draw. He spends some time just sitting in his dark apartment, wondering what life would be like if he could just pick up the phone and call Bill or Bev or Eddie. He spends even more time wishing that he’d never heard from Mike at all, and he never had to remember anything. When he didn’t remember Eddie, he didn’t have to love him or live with the fact that he disappoints him. He could just be a coward on his own terms. 

The days blend together. He has enough savings that he gets by okay for a while. He makes some new friends who think he’s funny and give him as much coke as he wants, and then other stuff when he wants that too. Before he knows it, Christmas comes and goes. It’s December 27th when he realizes that he missed it. He wonders if there was a big party that he missed somewhere, and if he even would have been invited at all after pulling his disappearing act. 

As time goes by, he thinks more and more about Stan. He comes to realize that Stan was the smart one. He got out. He didn’t have to face It or any of them or his past at all. He didn’t have to wonder about what would happen next. He didn’t have to be scared anymore. So one night, Richie drinks enough to make the fear go away, gets into the tub, and lets Stan lead by example.


	3. Soon You’ll Get Better

The doctor calls it a nervous breakdown. 

Richie wakes up in what is most certainly a cot in the Emergency Room. He doesn’t remember getting here or calling anyone for help, but he’s here and he’s not dead, and both of those things suck. His arms are wrapped from wrist to elbow and he’s in soft restraints, which is probably fair. He also feels like complete shit. That also seems fair. 

The doctor tells him his landlady found him because his bathtub flooded his downstairs neighbor’s apartment. He feels distantly bad about that. Water damage is a real bitch. He explains that he was given stitches and several blood transfusions and they’re keeping their eyes on him for signs of infection or anything else. They talk a while and Richie is surprised at how easy it is to be honest with this man who probably really that much older than he is. He also doesn’t really remember the last time anyone who asked him how he was really cared to know the real answer. That’s when they start talking about the nervous breakdown, and all the criteria seems to make sense. Depression, anxiety, insomnia, withdrawal from friends and family, isolation. He tells the doctor about the alcohol and the drugs too, because it’s not like he can really be any more fucked than he already is. 

“Your emergency contact is in his way,” the doctor says, and Richie honestly doesn’t know who that might be. “We called him when you arrived, after we identified you. He should be here shortly. You two should talk about what your best options for treatment are, Mr. Tozier. There’s a great facility associated with our hospital that has mental health treatment and rehab facilities.”

Richie just nods at him so he’ll leave. He doesn’t want to talk about treatment centers or rehab. He just wants to go home. He wonders if he’ll even be allowed back in his apartment. Can his landlady kick him out for trying to off himself in the bathroom?

It turns out that his emergency contact is Jason. He kind of expected it to be - but he stops himself before he can complete that thought. He remembers as soon as he sees him that they’d agreed it was a fine choice since Richie didn’t have any close relationships to speak of. Still he feels badly seeing Jason shuffle awkwardly into the tiny room. 

“I’m sorry, man,” he says immediately. His throat hurts, and he wonders briefly if he puked. “I forgot to change the stupid thing after you fired me. The form. I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here.”

“No, I’m sorry, Rich,” Jason says fretfully. He sits down at Richie’s bedside. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you when you said you didn’t want to do Reno, and I’m sorry I let you go after. I knew something was wrong. I should have stuck by you.”

“Don’t be sorry, man. You couldn’t have known how big a fuck up I am. I mean, I guess maybe you should have known because you’ve been my manager for like ten years, but still,” he jokes. Jason frowns deeper, and his eyes start to look wet. “Jason, come on. It’s not like we were friends or whatever. You were my manager and then you weren’t. I stopped being your responsibility.”

“You don’t think we were friends?” Jason asks. He looks genuinely hurt and surprised. 

Richie clears his throat. “I’m not exactly a friendly guy, Jason. I don’t do relationships, remember?”

Jason cries a little. Richie just lets him and doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t know what there is to say. He doesn’t really understand why Jason is sad. He knows he’s sad, but he’s definitely not sad in the same way that Jason is sad, and he doesn’t think Jason needs to be sad at all. 

“I think you should check yourself into this program,” Jason tells him. He awkwardly makes a move to hand Richie a pamphlet and then realizes he can’t because Richie’s arms are strapped down. He opens the pamphlet instead and Richie can see the words on display. Saint Anthony’s Rehabilitation and Mental Health Counseling. 

“I don’t need a program,” Richie objects automatically. Jason takes his hand. He wants to pull away, but he doesn’t because he doesn’t remember the last time he was touched by anyone. It only takes him a moment to come back to himself and shake him off. 

“It’s inpatient treatment,” Jason explains. “You stay twelve weeks. It’s intensive therapy and rehab. You need to get clean, Rich, and you need to talk to someone about what’s going on in your head so that someone can help you.”

“I don’t want help,” Richie says stubbornly, and it’s true. He doesn’t want help. He just wants to be left alone so he can finish the job. 

“I got that, Rich, by the way you pulled away from everyone,” Jason says, smiling painfully, “but even though you seem to think we were never friends, I think we were. I think we are. I’m your friend, and I want you to try this. Please, Richie.”

That’s how Richie finds himself being checked out of the Emergency Room and into St. Anthony’s. He doesn’t know why he agreed to do it, but he did. That’s a good first step, he thinks. Maybe. Either way, he’s literally stuck in the treatment center for the next twelve weeks. He had to sign a contract agreeing that he’d stay in the facility for the duration and participate in his assigned activities. He’s not allowed to leave the grounds at all, but he’s allowed to have visitors on Saturdays, so Jason promises to visit. Richie thinks it’s the least he can do since he’s forcing him to do this in the first place. 

Getting clean is the shittiest part of the whole fucking thing. He spends the first week and weekend sick as a dog, unable to sleep, and so irritable and upset that he’s positive he’s making an enemy of every staff member in the facility. He screams and cries and begs for just one drink, please, just something to take the edge off. No one gives him anything and he hates them all. 

Eventually, though, he starts vomiting less. He starts to be able to sleep through the night. All of the staff is friendly even though he’s sure he said some pretty unkind things about all of their mothers at some point. He still itches for just one fucking drink, but he feels somewhat leveled out after two weeks. His anxiety is through the roof, though, and he has to be forced to his first real therapy appointment by two muscled orderlies. It doesn’t take a lot of effort on their part, to be fair. Richie didn’t recognize himself the first time he saw his reflection. He was a frail teenager and a weak and nearly beer-gutted adult, but now he’s so thin and sickly looking that he thinks the wind could blow him away. 

His therapist is a man who looks like she’s probably ten years younger than he is. He feels jittery under his gaze, like a kid in the principal’s office. His smile is kind and seems genuine. 

“Mr. Tozier, it’s good to finally meet you,” he says warmly. “Can I call you Richard?”

“Richie,” he corrects him. He reaches out to shake his hand when she offers it. “Everyone calls me Richie.”

“Richie, then,” he says warmly. “I’m Dr. Andrews. You can call me that, or Phil, if you’d prefer.”

Richie taps his fingers against his knee impatiently. “Okay, so. What’s up, doc? How does this work?”

“Well, I’d like to use this time to get to know you a little bit, so I can get an idea of which activities you should participate in for the rest of your time here, now that you’re well enough to join the others,” he says. 

“Yeah, I definitely have to say that I’m not really into the idea of talking about my feelings and shit with a bunch of strangers,” Richie says. 

“How about one stranger?” He counters. “I read your file, Richie, and it looks like you were at least forthcoming with the doctor on call at the ER. He reported that you had a nervous breakdown and showed signs of depression and possibly PTSD. Your friend Jason told us that you seemed changed after you took a personal trip to your hometown for a family emergency. Will you tell me about that?”

“No,” Richie says without thinking. “No, I won’t tell you about that. I don’t talk about Derry. I won’t.”

He pauses. “Your denial is a little telling, Richie. I won’t lie.”

Shit. Richie looks away, out the window. It’s a nice day outside. The sun is out. He hasn’t been outside in a long time. 

“I just... I can’t.”

He really can’t. What is he supposed to say? He can’t exactly tell him that a psycho alien clown killed a bunch of kids in his town when he was a kid and they all had to go back to kill it again because the first time didn’t stick. They’d lock him up for sure. He may be crazy, but he hasn’t completely lost his mind yet. He shakes his head. Dr. Andrews clicks his pen. 

“Richie, no one here is going to judge you,” he says gently. “And, as your doctor, there’s confidentiality between us. Anything you say to me is strictly between the two of us.”

Dr. Andrews assigns him to general group therapy for dealing with his anxiety and to a group of people dealing with addiction. As an afterthought, he tells him to attend a meeting centered around losing a loved one, but Richie doesn’t know if he knows about Stan or not. 

The group therapy isn’t all bad. Sometimes they have their meeting outside, and he likes being able to sit on the grass and smell air that isn’t stuffy. Some of the people in group are way more normal than he is. Some of them aren’t even living at the facility, they travel to meetings every other day because they feel like they actually help. It’s kind of refreshing to meet people who feel the same way as he does, even if he doesn’t think he can truly relate to them. 

At week four, Dr. A, as he’s come to call him, prescribes him an antidepressant. He thinks they work okay, after a while. He still feels like he’s on edge all the time. The stitches have come out and the bandages are gone and he wears long sleeved shirts every day so he doesn’t have to look at the ugly scars he left behind. That week, he also gets a haircut, which is a welcome change. He gets it cut shorter than he’s had it in a long time, and they let him shave with supervision too. His shaggy hair and scruffy beard are gone, and he feels sort of different and sort of not different at all. He’s on a strict vitamin regimen and he’s put a little weight back on thanks to him being required to attend breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. 

It gets easier to talk to Dr. A about everything, too. He does seem to genuinely care about all of his patients. In private, Richie talks to him about how he pushes everyone away, won’t make friendships, and had to use alcohol as a tool to interact with people. What he can’t tell him is why, at least not at first. 

“My... best friend,” he says carefully at week six. Dr. A is leaned slightly over his desk, watching him closely as he speaks. He doesn’t look at him. “When I went back to Derry last year, he... he got hurt. He was protecting me and he almost died. He did die, I swear he did, for a second. He was bleeding and - and I took off my jacket and I was holding it on his chest, you know? Like some medical drama. I was holding his fucking guts in my hand and he was - I had his blood on my glasses and everything. I still dream about it sometimes. A lot of the time. Like every night, almost, I guess.” He doesn’t mention any other parts of his nightmares, like Eddie calling him a coward or Pennywise singing in his ear about his dirty little secret. 

“What’s your friend’s name?” Dr. A asks quietly. He’s never talked to him about Derry before that moment, not Derry from last year or Derry from twenty-seven years before. 

He can’t make himself say it at first. “Ed-Eddie. His name’s Eddie.”

“How did he get hurt?”

“Fucking stabbed,” Richie says, which isn’t entirely untrue. “Right in the back, but it went through his whole ch-chest and... I just remember, I was just coming back to, you know, from being knocked out, and one second he was there and he looked so happy because he thought he saved me, and then... And he was dead. He’s always dead in my dreams. But he didn’t die, so I don’t get it.”

“Do you feel guilty that he was injured?” 

“Yeah. Of course. The guy - he was going after me, you know? Because I was trying to help our other friend. Eddie shouldn’t have gotten between us, but I - if I hadn’t egged the guy on... I don’t know.” Richie whispers. If he hadn’t distracted him, Pennywise would’ve killed Mike. He had to distract him, but it had cost him everything. It had cost him his secret. It had cost him Eddie. 

“How is Eddie doing now?” Dr. A asks. Richie feels tears well in his eyes. He clenches and unclenches his jaw. 

“I don’t know,” he grinds out. “We got him tot he hospital, and he. He was in surgery, and then they let us all see him, but I was last and I was with him when he started to come to, but I had already said... and I had already done too much, and they knew, so I had to go. I left and I didn’t say anything to Eddie it anyone and I came back to LA and I got a new phone and I moved out of my apartment and I made it so none of them could find me, and I don’t know if Eddie ended up dying after all or if he’s alive somewhere or anything, and now I probably never will, and... and it’s all my fault.”

Dr. Andrews doesn’t say anything during his meltdown. He cries until he almost passes out, and he lets him just cry. It’s cathartic, he thinks, to be able to cry and feel completely unjudged. 

At week seven, Dr. A diagnoses him with PTSD. It’s a surprise and it’s not. His flashbacks, anxiety, emotional numbness - it all makes sense. He just always considered PTSD to be something that people got when they went through some really hard shit, like war. He tells that to Dr. A, and he looks at him in that fond way that makes him feel like he said something really fucking stupid but he’s too nice to point it out. He puts him on a new medication, which he doesn’t like, so he puts him on something else after two weeks. 

It’s week nine when he has the breakdown of all breakdowns. He can’t even lose his marbles in the privacy of one on one therapy, either. Of course, it has to be in the middle of group, when they’re all sitting in a circle in stupid metal chairs and shooting the shit about childhood trauma. 

“Yeah, I don’t know. My childhood was fine. Great,” he shrugs. He folds his arms over his chest and tries not to think about the scars he’s hiding under his sleeves. 

“Great?” one of the other patients, Avery, asks. “No offense, but I don’t think we end up in a place like this because we all had great childhoods.” Most people in the group laugh, and he even makes Richie smile a little. 

“I don’t know, man. It was good. My dad was great. My mom wasn’t really around, I guess, but I don’t know. It was a different time. I was never home anyway, I was always screwing around in town with my friends. We’d ride around on bikes or go to the arcade or whatever. That’s what I remember about being a kid: always being with my friends,” he says. 

“I can’t stand my friends, like, ninety percent of the time,” one of the girls, Hannah, says around a mouthful of fingers. She gnaws her fingernails to the quick, and it’s gross, but Richie doesn’t point it out because it makes her embarrassed. “You ever fight with them? I’m fighting with Jessica, like, every other day, I swear to god.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. We fought one summer, I guess. I was alone a lot of that summer. I remember - okay, yeah, I remember being at the arcade playing Street Fighter against this kid, right, and I won and he was going to leave but I asked him to play again, because I had more tokens or whatever, and...” he swallows. He doesn’t know why he started this story and now he doesn’t want to finish it. Dr. A is watching him, though, so he forces himself to keep talking even though he feels like he’s choking on the words. “So it turns out he was the cousin of my main bully, right? So they all called me a faggot and ran me out of there. I never went back to that arcade, actually, after that. Not until last year, I guess, but it was closed, so. I don’t know why I told that story.”

“Kids suck,” another girl sympathizes. She’s pretty new and Richie doesn’t know her name. He nods. 

“Yeah. It sucked because I always used to play against Eddie, but then I just never wanted to go back after that. I felt like they’d all look at me and they’d know,” he says hollowly. He starts crying, and then he’s embarrassed because he doesn’t like crying in front of everyone. “I was so afraid that they’d know, and now they do know. They know, don’t they? They know.”

“I think we’ll adjourn for the day,” Dr. A says gently. Richie takes off his glasses and covers his face with his other hand. His shoulders heave with sobs. Everyone gets the hint, and they all start moving their chairs back to where they belong and heading back to their rooms. 

“They know. They know,” he weeps. Dr. A kneels down in front of him and touches his hand. He’s gentle, but Richie flinches away from him and scoots his chair back. “No, no don’t touch me. You can’t.”

“Why not, Richie?” he asks gently. “I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to. Will you tell me why I can’t?”

“You can’t,” Richie sobs. The itch is back, deep and sharp and crawling up his neck and down his back. The fear. “I can’t tell you. You just can’t.”

“Okay, Richie,” Dr. A agrees. Richie shakes his head. 

“I’m sorry,” he whimpers. He scrubs at his eyes and sobs some more. “I can’t - they know, and I can’t -“

“What do they know?” Dr. A asks. “Let me help you, Richie. Breathe.”

He tries to breathe, but it’s easier said than done. He can’t stop fucking crying, and it’s making him panic. What if he can never stop? What if he just keeps crying until he suffocated and dies in this fucking chair? At least in his bathtub, he was in control of where he died. He doesn’t want to die here. 

“They know. About me,” he grinds out. He balls up the end of his sleeve in his fist and presses it to his eye to try to stem his tears. “They all know about me. That I’m a fucking faggot. So I had to leave, but they still know, and - no! Don’t touch me!”

He flinches away as an orderly, a younger man who had only come over to bring him some water, touches his shoulder gently to get his attention. Dr. A accepts the water bottle and shoos him away. Richie takes the water from him and struggles to steady his hands enough to drink it. 

They spend the next two weeks in one on one sessions talking about why he internalized so much shame about being gay, about Eddie a lot, and about why he thought it mattered if his friends knew or not. It’s a lot to handle. He stops eating again for a while, but forces himself to try when Dr. A starts talking about other medications again. He’s starting to feel evened out, like maybe he could face being part of actual society again. He thinks that’s probably good, especially since his three month stay is almost over. 

On week ten, he goes to the visiting area in the fenced-off square behind the art building to wait for Jason. Jason has been a steady support for him and has made a point to visit every week. He sits on their regular bench and waits for him to arrive, but Jason doesn’t come. 

He doesn’t say anything when his visitor sits down next to him. He doesn’t even dare to turn his head to look. Richie stares straight ahead and bites down on his lip and tries to feel angry enough at himself that the stupid, frustrating tears will just go away. He hunches his shoulders up to his ears and stares across the square at the old tree planted next to the art building. 

“I would say you look good, but you kind of look like shit, Richie,” Eddie says quietly. Richie can feel his lips trembling. 

“How did you find me?” he asks. 

“Well you didn’t make it fucking easy, dickwad,” Eddie says gently. “You’re kind of famous, man. Paparazzi reported you were here. Bill helped me dig around a little and we found your manager -“

“Jason’s not my manager. He dropped me,” Richie interrupts. 

“Well, we found your former manager, then. We told him how we knew you from Derry,” Eddie says. 

“And they just let anybody in here?” Richie bites out. “Don’t I have any say in who visits me during my own mental breakdown?”

Eddie doesn’t say anything at first. “Richie, will you look at me?” He asks. He doesn’t want to. Maybe if he doesn’t, he can chalk this up to another one of his auditory hallucinations. There’s probably a new medication he could get for that. Maybe that’s all it is, he thinks. Maybe he can add Eddie’s voice onto the song that follows him everywhere. _I know your secret, your dirty little secret!_

He closes his eyes and swallows hard. His hands are shoved into his sweatshirt pockets. It’s hot out, but he won’t take it off. He’s not the only person in the facility who attempted suicide, but their scars don’t bother him as much as his own do. 

“Richie?”

He opens his eyes, blinking fast to try to clear them of tears, and looks over at Eddie. He looks just the same as he had the year before, except for the scar on his cheek. He has the same professional haircut, and he’s even wearing a polo shirt under a cleanly pressed cardigan. He’s a mirror image of what he looked like the first time Richie saw him again, after all those years. Maybe this is a hallucination, he thinks for a moment. He’s afraid. 

“It’s okay if I look like shit. You look good enough for both of us,” he jokes quietly. Eddie sighs. Richie swipes at his eyes under his glasses. “It’s fucking good to see you, Eds.”

“It’s good to see you too, Richie,” Eddie says. He reaches for his arm, but Richie flinches away. He drops his hand and looks sad. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find you sooner.”

“I didn’t want you to find me,” Richie says. Eddie nods. 

“Yeah, I got that. You probably should’ve known that it wouldn’t have kept me away, though,” he says. 

“What are you doing here, Eds?” he asks. “What do you want from me? An apology? Because I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I think about what happened and what I did every fucking day, okay? I’m sorry. I’m not saying - I’m not saying I should have stayed because I couldn’t. But I did it the wrong way. You were right in your voicemail when you said I was an asshole for leaving while you were asleep. I just - I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“I don’t really even remember leaving that voicemail,” Eddie admits. “This first few weeks... I was on so many painkillers and shit. It’s all pretty blurry. Sorry that I called you an asshole.”

“No, I was an asshole. Don’t you get it? I made you go down there with us even though you didn’t want to, and then I taunted P-Pennywise and you got hurt because of me. You almost died and it was my fucking fault,” Richie snaps. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Eddie says. He’s shaking his head. “I didn’t have to go down there with you guys, but I swore that I would.”

“I hyped you up. I told you to be brave. I made you,” Richie argues. He exhales heavily and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “What are you doing here, Eddie?”

“I came to see you, you fucking idiot, to make sure you were okay,” Eddie snaps. Richie feels guilt flare in his chest. It’s more than he’d ever done for Eddie. “Jason said you’re getting released soon, and you’re gonna need someone to help you get back on your feet. That’s me, dumbass.”

Richie stares at him. No, he thinks. “No,” he says. 

“Yes, Richie. I already talked to Jason. I’m going to stay with you for a while and we’re gonna help you figure out where to go from here. I’m not gonna let you run away from this, Richie,” Eddie says. 

“You should,” he whispers. He breaks eye contact, looks down at his hands. “You don’t have to be here, Eds. I got myself into this. You don’t have to pull me out.”

“You pulled me out of that sewer,” Eddie argues. Richie shakes his head. 

“No, I didn’t. Ben did,” he murmurs. 

“Because you asked him to. They were going to leave me down there if it weren’t for you. They thought I was already dead. They told me.”

Richie wipes his eyes again. It’s a relief to see Eddie alive and doing well, and sitting there next to him like everything is normal is also maybe one of the hardest things he’s ever done. They spend a little more time together before visiting hours are over and Richie has to go to his alcoholic support group. He doesn’t know how much he’ll be able to participate in that one, but he’ll go. He has to, especially in that moment, when he wants nothing more than to drown himself in bourbon. 

On the first day of his last week at St. Anthony’s, he tells Dr. A that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for him to go back to his apartment with Eddie. They’ve spoken in depth about Eddie and the rest of his friends since Eddie showed up and sent Richie into a two-day panic attack. It’s hard to see him again when he thought it was over for real. 

“He knows, so,” Richie starts, fiddling nervously with his sleeves, “so it’ll be... It’ll be awkward. I don’t think I can do it. I think I’ll be fine on my own.”

“Richie, you know how important it is for patients who leave here to have a steady support system so that they can stay on track with their recovery,” Dr. A says carefully. “I’m not going to change my mind in this, and I don’t think Eddie is either. He’s already been given your release paperwork and you signed the papers allowing him to check you out this weekend.”

He had. He didn’t know why he’d agreed to it, but he did. A moment of weakness, he tells himself. A moment of longing. 

“But he _knows_,” Richie insists. 

“How do you know he knows?” Dr. A asks. 

“Because - Because they all know. All of our friends. Or at least Beverly. Beverly knew,” he says. He’s sure of that at least. He remembers what she said in her voicemail. ‘You can talk to me about... about anything. We’re all here for you no matter what.’

“Do you not trust Beverly to keep that in confidence until you’re ready to talk about it on your own?” Dr. A asks. He carefully sidesteps around the word secret. Richie can’t hear the word without feeling like he’s spiraling. “Is she not trustworthy?”

“She is,” Richie objects immediately. “Bev is great. She’s one of the best people in... in the whole world. She’s trustworthy. Of course she is.”

“If you believe that, then I believe it, too. If she’s as amazing as you say, I don’t think she’d say anything to Eddie before you got the chance. Also, males as a species are pretty unobservant, Richie. You know this. It could be possible that your other friends have no idea,” Dr. A says. “Even if they do, why do you think it will change anything?”

“I just... I just never wanted anyone to know. I thought I could ignore it and it would go away, and I could just be normal. I’ve just been trying to be normal,” he says. 

“You are normal, Richie,” Dr. A says. “You’re struggling right now, but you’re getting better. It’s normal to struggle, and it’s normal to just be the way you are, the way you were born. Here, I want you to have this before you go. I don’t think you need it, but you should hang onto it until you start to understand why I think that.”

He holds his hand out and drops a small silver pendant on a chain into Richie’s palm. Richie studies the small figures imprinted on the flat surface for a moment, then looks up at his doctor. 

“What is it?” he asks. “If I don’t need it, why are you giving it to me?”

“It’s Saint Anthony,” Dr. A tells him. “You hang onto that for a while. I think you’ll figure it out on your own.” Richie doesn’t know what to make of that, so he just nods and slips the chain over his head, tucking the pendant under his shirt. It hangs gently over his heart. 

Eddie picks him up on Saturday. He leaves with his own prescription bottles, a strict medication schedule, and outpatient appointments with Dr. A every week for the next six weeks. He has instructions to look for AA meetings near home during the week he’s home, before his next therapy appointment. He doesn’t have to attend, but he has to find one in preparation to begin attending in the future. 

Eddie carries his small bag to the car. Richie zips his sweatshirt all the way up and pulls the sleeves over his hands even though it’s the beginning of summer in LA. 

“Jason gave me your house key, so I went over yesterday and made the place comfortable, cleaned up a little bit. I set myself up in your guest room,” Eddie explains as they get in the car. Richie tugs on his seatbelt and nods silently. “It’s a nice little apartment, by the way. Not that I was worried.”

Richie cracks a smile. “It was a dump the last time it was there. I’m surprised you didn’t just burn it down.”

“Yeah it was pretty bad. It looks great now,” Eddie admits. He reaches out to pat Richie on the arm, but Richie shoves his hands in his sweatshirt pockets and makes himself as small as he can so he won’t. Eddie just swallows and starts the car, but he doesn’t drive. After a moment, he says, “You’re gonna be okay, Richie. You’ll get better. You’ll see.”

Richie’s jaw works. “How do you know?” he asks. 

“Because I know. I believe you will,” Eddie says. “You’ll get better if you believe you will.”

Richie nods, but he doesn’t know what he believes.


	4. Afterglow

Eddie locks the door behind them and sets Richie’s bag down on the recliner, then disappears into the kitchen. Richie stands near the door and takes in his immaculately clean apartment for a moment while he listens to Eddie move around like he owns the place. He wonders if Eddie really only started cleaning the day before or if he’d been there longer than that, making himself a part of Richie’s life while he was locked up in a mental health facility. He swallows hard. 

“Listen,” he whispers. He clears his throat. “Listen, man. Thanks for coming to see me and everything, and for bringing me home and cleaning my shit hole apartment for me. You don’t have to stay. I promise not to, like, try to off myself again, or whatever.”

Eddie stops puttering around in the kitchen. Richie steps toward the doorway so he can see what he’s doing. Eddie’s standing at the counter between the refrigerator and the sink. There’s bread and deli meat in front of him on a plate, but he’s not moving. He must have gone shopping, Richie realizes, because even if there had been food in the house when he went to the hospital (there wasn’t), it would all have gone bad by now. Eddie doesn’t move. He just holds a butter knife slathered in mayo and breathes quietly for a moment. 

“Wow, Richie. You must have a pretty low opinion of me, huh?” Eddie says eventually. He continues making his sandwich. Richie feels his shoulders hunch up to his ears. He balls his hands and shoves them into his pockets. 

“No, Eds. That’s not true at all,” he argues weakly. Eddie finishes the sandwich and puts the plate on the table. He looks pointedly at Richie until he sits down, then he slides the sandwich over to him. 

“You must think I’m pretty stupid if you really think I’m gonna believe a word you say to me right now,” Eddie says, but there’s no real heat behind his words. 

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Richie mumbles. His eyes wander toward the counter where Eddie had made their lunches. His knife block is gone, and he’s sure that anything sharper than the butter knife Eddie had used to spread his mayo would be gone too. He’s also sure that the liquor cabinet is probably bare. It makes him jittery. 

“And I know you’re not stupid,” Eddie says. He makes another sandwich and then sits across from Richie at the table. “I know you’re not stupid, so I know you don’t actually think I would just leave you here on your own. I’m not going anywhere, Rich. I said it and I meant it. I’m gonna help you get through this. Eat your sandwich.”

Richie eats because Eddie told him to. He knows he’s skinny and sickly looking. Dr. Andrews had worried about his weight loss, but he tried to keep it under control the best that he could. He chews mechanically and doesn’t taste much. It’s okay though, because Eddie is with him, and he’s eating too. He’s alive. He’s okay. 

His bedroom is the same way he remembered it, except that the sheets and comforter are clean and the rug is vacuumed. Eddie unpacks his backpack and helps him sort clean clothes from dirty ones, then promises to run down to the laundry room in the basement at some point so that he can have more clean options. Richie just nods because he doesn’t know if he’s supposed to volunteer to do it himself or not. 

He goes to the bathroom and stares at the tub for a minute, and he wonders if someone else cleaned up his blood or if Eddie had had to do that, too. He does his business and returns to the living room, where he awkwardly pulls at his sleeves and tries to think of what to say. Eddie is on the couch, flipping through channels as if he has any idea of what he’s trying to find. 

“Full disclosure,” Richie says mildly, “there’s a bottle of Tylenol in the medicine cabinet. There’s no Tylenol in there. It’s all Percocet that I got off this guy I used to know. I know I’m only in alcoholics anonymous right now, but... I don’t know. Dr. A knows I did more hard stuff than just alcohol. You should probably get rid of it. If you want.”

Eddie nods immediately and goes to the bathroom. He takes the bottle out and then checks the other bottles he finds there, too. He ends up emptying the entire cabinet and replacing everything with the prescriptions that Dr. A had given them. 

“Thank you for telling me. Is there anything else?” Eddie asks. He puts all the bottles into a plastic bag. Richie eyes it for a moment, then meets his eyes. He wants to say no. 

“There was some coke in my nightstand,” he whispers. “I might have finished it, though. I can’t remember.” Eddie nods and goes to the bedroom, where he rifles around for a while before producing the bag Richie had told him about and another bottle of Tylenol that he wanted to get rid of. Richie flinches when Eddie claps him on the shoulder. 

It’s weird to live with Eddie, at first. Richie tip-toes around him because he’s not sure at any point what the right way to act is. He went from being alone to being forced into a group, and he’s not used to having alone time anymore. When Eddie isn’t home, he doesn’t know what to do. He used to sit around and get drunk, but he obviously can’t do that anymore. Eddie is good about not leaving the house too often, but he does go places like the grocery store and Target and the basement to do laundry. Richie usually trails along behind him, and Eddie usually lets him. 

Sometimes, though, Eddie just runs down to the corner store to grab one thing, and Richie stays home. He sits in his quiet, oppressive apartment for the ten minutes it takes Eddie to get back and works himself up into a full blown panic attack by the time his friend comes back with a box of spaghetti. Eddie’s read all the literature that Dr. A has given them about how to deal with his anxiety, and he does a good job helping Richie get grounded again without touching him. It’s easier to be sober when he’s around people. He tells Eddie that, and then he regrets it because one day, when Eddie needs to go somewhere for some reason he doesn’t tell Richie about, he’s only alone at the apartment for all of two minutes when someone knocks on the door. 

He almost doesn’t answer. He’s not expecting visitors, and Eddie has a key. He’d planned on trying his best to tidy up the kitchen while Eddie was gone for a few hours, or maybe just hiding in his bed if that seemed too hard. He hadn’t decided if it was a task worth undertaking yet. His visitor knocks again. 

“Hey, Rich? You gonna open up, or do we have to wait out here all afternoon?”

Richie frowns. When he opens the door, Ben and Beverly are standing in his hall. He bites the inside of his cheek. 

“Hi,” he says awkwardly. 

“Hi,” Bev repeats. Her voice is so warm that he lets her go in for the hug, but he can’t quite hold back his flinch, and he ends it quickly. He briefly and awkwardly meets Ben’s eyes and then looks away when he sees Ben’s brain working. He’d always been the most observant of all of them. 

“Hi,” he says awkwardly. “Come in. Sorry.”

He haphazardly folds the sofa blanket while they take their shoes off. He looks down at his sweatpants and long-sleeved tee shirt and feels self conscious for a moment. He tosses the blanket in the back of the couch. 

“Once again, you guys look amazing, and I’m definitely the schlubbiest one in the room,” he jokes. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and tries to look relaxed in his own home. “Come in. Make yourselves at home, or whatever. No offense, but I was pretty sure you guys were living on the east coast somewhere, which means you’re kind of on the wrong side of the country. Not that I’m not happy to see you, just... To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I actually like that haircut on you,” Bev says. He runs a hand over his shirt hair self consciously. “I feel like I can finally see your face. And Eddie mentioned that he was going to be out for the afternoon and that it might be a good idea to stop in and see you.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he says, a little harsher than means to. He pulls at his fingers anxiously. 

“We know, Richie. That’s not what this is. It’s been a year since we’ve seen you, you know. We wanted to catch up, too,” Ben says. 

“Ben and I were in the area already because we were looking at venues for our wedding,” Bev adds. Richie deflates, his defensiveness floating away. 

“Wedding?” he whispers. His lips are trembling. He looks for the ring on her slim finger. She holds her hand out to make it easier. It’s a very decently huge rock on a pretty gold band. 

“I know it seems fast,” she says bashfully, “especially after my divorce, but...”

“Feels sort of more like it took you guys long enough,” Richie jokes. “Only took you almost thirty years to get your shit together. I’d offer you guys a drink to celebrate, but I’m miserably sober these days, so I mean. I have lemonade. We could cheers with some lemonade, I guess. I’ll get the glasses.”

He busies himself in the kitchen with the glasses. His hands are shaking. He just keeps thinking about how Bev is here and how she knows about him, and what he must look like in her eyes. She hasn’t said anything, and he doesn’t know how to ask. He thinks maybe he could sneak into the bathroom and try to call Dr. A and ask what to do, but he doesn’t know how he’d explain it. 

He hands them each a glass and wonders if they can see his shaking hands. “Cold in here,” he mumbles. It sort of is, because he won’t go anywhere without long sleeves and he’s not trying to have heat stroke in the stifling LA heat, so he leaves the air conditioning on high at all times. Eddie doesn’t complain. 

They cheers and sit and chat for a while. Ben excuses himself to the bathroom, and Richie feels like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world than alone with Bev. She always has that look on her face like she knows everything, and she really always does. 

“You didn’t...” he starts to say. He swallows hard and plays with the ends of his sleeves. 

“Didn’t what?” she asks. Richie shakes his head. 

“I’m sorry I left so fast back then,” he says instead. One of the steps of AA is to make amends. His sponsor told him he didn’t necessarily have to take the twelve steps in order, with the exception of the first step. That was an easy one for him anyway, since it was obvious even to him that he’d totally lost control of all of his shit. He can make amends. Probably. “I shouldn’t have done it the way I did. I shouldn’t have ignored all your calls and everything after, either. I felt like I had to, at the time. Dr. Andrews says I didn’t have to, but I’m still working on accepting that part, so. Anyway, I’m still sorry.”

“Why did you feel like you had to?” Bev asks. Richie looks down at his lap. 

“Same reason I had to do this,” he says quietly. He touches his arm, where the scar is covered by his sleeve. He can feel the raised line from his wrist to his elbow. It’s the same on the other arm, too, but that one only goes halfway up his arm and then tapers off to the side because his hand had slipped. 

“Why, Richie?” Bev asks again. He looks up at her. Her eyes are shiny. He can see Ben standing in the doorway out of the corner of his eye. 

“You know why,” he whispers. “You of all people know why, Bev, and we both know it. I had to. I thought I did.”

She looks up at Ben. He smiles weakly at her, trying to make her feel better. Richie shakes his head. 

“Did you tell him?” Richie asks. 

“No,” Bev says carefully, “we haven’t talked about it. I haven’t talked about it with anyone. I don’t know what he knows because it isn’t a topic we should discuss without talking to you first.” 

Ben comes to sit back down next to Beverly. “I’m not sure what we’re talking about,” he says slowly.

Richie sighs. “You should tell him,” he says. “I... I can’t. I can’t say it. I’m sorry I can’t say it, Ben.”

“It’s okay,” Ben says. He looks at Beverly and takes her hand. She just keeps staring at Richie. 

“It’s not for me to say, Richie,” she tries, but he shakes his head. 

“I can’t say it, Bev, I can’t -“

“Then we don’t have to talk about it,” she says. “We can wait until you’re ready.”

“I’m not gonna be ready, ever. Don’t you get that? I’m fucking forty years old and I can’t even say it,” he argues. “What am I supposed to do here, Bev? I don’t want to become an old, crazy bastard who can’t even tell his friends that he’s -“ He bites his cheek again. “Just tell him.”

Bev sighs. She turns to Ben, and Richie can see their hands are tangled together. He wonders what that’s like, but knows he’ll never have it, so he tries to let the thought go. He focuses on Ben instead, the way his expressive face is scrunched in worry. 

“It’s nothing bad,” Bev says. “And it’s nothing to be ashamed of, either, Richie. It’s normal to have those feelings. I don’t think I should do this for you. It’s something you have to do on your own time, when you’re ready -“

“I’m never gonna be ready to tell everyone that I’m a fucking faggot, okay Bevvie?” he snaps. His teeth click together hard with the force of how fast he slams his mouth shut. 

“Please don’t call yourself that,” Bev says quietly. She has tears in her eyes. 

“Call myself what? It’s true.”

“It’s not nice,” she argues. 

“I don’t have a very good track record right now of being nice to myself,” he says shortly. “So there you go, Benny Boy. Now you know.”

Ben’s jaw works. He clears his throat and Richie braces himself for the attack. 

“It makes me sad to think that you thought that would change anything about how much we care about you, Richie,” he says eventually. “It doesn’t, for the record. We love you, man. Nothing is going to change that.”

Richie stares at him. He looks like he’s going to cry. “Hey, man, don’t - don’t be sad, okay? It’s not a you thing. It’s just... I just... I couldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want anyone to know, but people knew anyway. Bev knew. How long did you know?”

“It occurred to me when we were kids,” she admits softly. “Because of the way... because of the way...”

“Because of the way I was in love with Eddie,” Richie finishes for her. He laughs. “Yeah, I thought I was so fucking s-secretive with that shit. I thought I was hiding it so well, but even fucking Henry Bowers knew.”

His skin crawls. He stands up and starts pacing. His chest hurts. The itch. He starts digging his fingernails into chest, his neck, but stops when he feels the chain against his fingertips. He pulls the medal out and clenches it in his fist and tries to breathe even though he can’t. 

“I’m having a panic attack,” he announces, then turns on his heel and goes to the kitchen. He grabs a handful of ice out of the freezer and then shoves himself into the corner between the refrigerator and the wall and tries his best to breathe through it with the ice in one hand and his pendant in the other. 

When he comes back around, the first thing he understands is that he’s in his forties and he’s way too old to be sitting on hard tile floors for any extended period of time because his back is absolutely killing him. His right sleeve and pant leg are also completely soaked from the melted ice. His hands and feet and lips still feel numb, but he can breathe okay. He takes a shuddering breath in through his nose and holds it for eight seconds, then exhales through his mouth. He does this three more times, then looks up to see that Ben and Bev are sitting on the floor across the kitchen, watching him carefully. 

“I need to eat something,” he slurs. He clears his throat and tries to make his numb mouth work again. “Can you - I can’t cook because Eddie put all the knives in the safe, and I don’t know the combination. He doesn’t even let me boil water. If you can get my wallet and just... can you just order whatever you guys wants and have it delivered. I can’t choose right now and I can’t call, but there’s,” he pauses, swallowing heavily. “There’s takeout menus in the drawer on the other side of the fridge. Can you do that? Please, Bev?”

“Of course,” she says immediately. She stands and goes to the other room to find her phone. 

“B-Ben,” Richie stutters. He breathes deeply again. “Ben, can you help me up? I need to change.”

Ben helps him get to his room and doesn’t say anything about his skinny body or ugly scars as he changes his clothes. 

“I had an issue with narcotics, a little bit,” Richie admits. He sits on his bed and turns his back to Ben so he doesn’t have to look at him. “So I’m afraid to like, take Xanax or anything when I feel a panic attack coming on, so I just have to ride it out. I’m sorry you guys had to see that, though.”

Ben sits next to him. “I meant it when I said it doesn’t change anything, you know. You guys are all my best friends. You always have been. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re gay. Have you told Eddie?”

“I can’t,” Richie says. He looks down at his hands. “What if he - what if -“

“It won’t matter to him either,” Ben promises. “You know Eddie, Rich. He’s your best friend. You guys have always been close. You’re not gonna scare him away.”

“I might. I might, though. I can’t take that chance. I tried to fucking kill myself so I’d never have to talk about it, and now it’s like it’s the only thing I ever talk about,” he jokes lamely. “I don’t know, Ben, because if he... if he left, you know, I would try again. To kill myself, I mean, but I wouldn’t be stupid about it this time. God, I need to talk to my fucking psychiatrist.”

“I hope that if you ever feel like that’s your only choice, you know you can call me or Bev. I promise that we are always gonna stick by you. Losers stick together, always. I love you, man,” Ben says. Richie swallows thickly. 

“I love you, too,” he chokes out, and he lets Ben pull him in for the quickest side hug in the universe. 

He puts in a phone call to Dr. A requesting an emergency appointment, and then he sits down at the kitchen table with Bev and Ben. They eat burrito bowls in silence until Eddie comes home. Richie notices he looks tired, but he greets their friends with a genuinely happy smile and joins them at the table. They talk a while, but no one mentions his epic meltdown until Dr. A returns his phone call. He feels better by then, but agrees to move up their weekly session to the next day anyway. He doesn’t know what goes on between his three friends while he’s out of the room, but he tells himself that they didn’t tell Eddie his secret. 

After they leave, he helps Eddie clean up the kitchen. He wants to ask where he all afternoon, but he also wants him to be able to have some privacy in his life and not feel the need to share everything. It’s not like they’re married. The though makes his jaw clench. 

Eddie is putting away the dishes. “You scratched up your neck,” he points out. His voice is even and not accusatory. Richie touches his collar. 

“Yeah, sorry,” he mumbles. “I had a panic attack and couldn’t get to the ice machine fast enough.”

“I’m glad you knew what to do. I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Eddie says. Richie shakes his head. 

“It’s okay,” he says. It is okay, he realizes, because he’s a little codependent but he knows he can’t always rely on Eddie for everything. He’s an adult and he has to figure out how to deal with his own shit. “Hey, Eds?”

“Yeah?” Eddie asks. His back is turned as he puts dishes away on a high shelf. 

“You need a stool to reach up there?” Richie jokes. Eddie scowls at him over his shoulder. 

“Fuck you, asshole,” he grumbles. Richie laughs. 

“That’s not actually what I was going to say. I was going to say... Well, I was going to ask how long you were going to stay here,” Richie says. 

Eddie finishes putting the dishes away and turns to Richie. “Sick of me already?”

“No!” Richie says immediately. “No, no, of course not. It’s... it’s nice to have you here. It’s nice not to be alone anymore.” Eddie smiles warmly at him. It’s such a nice smile. Richie admires the deep smile lines around his mouth for a moment, then turns his gaze to the floor so he’s not caught looking. “It’s just that... you must have a job and everything you have to get back to. And your wife.”

“I’m divorced,” Eddie says easily. Richie’s head jerks up in surprise. 

“What? Eddie, I’m sorry,” he says. 

“I’m not,” Eddie says easily. “It was a terrible relationship. It was bad for both of us, but I was complacent. Going through the motions. It’s better now.”

“Still,” Richie mumbles. “That couldn’t have been easy, especially after Derry.”

“It was and it wasn’t,” Eddie says. “She was smothering me. I was in a lot of pain and she wasn’t actually helping me, really. She has a very controlling personality, and I didn’t need her to mother me, I needed... I just needed people I loved to be there helping me.”

Guilt washes over him. “I’m sorry,” Richie mumbles. Eddie reaches for him, but he steps back, so he drops his hand. 

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean, I needed people who understood, and she didn’t. The whole divorce went over pretty quickly. I stayed with Ben and Bev for a while, but then I got my own place in New York. I did lose my job, but I got another one that lets me work from home, so that’s what I’m doing a lot of the time when I’m on the computer and we’re just watching television or whatever. It’s really flexible,” he explains. Richie nods. 

“I should’ve been there,” he says. 

Eddie is quiet for a minute. “I wish you had been. But when I say that, I don’t say it to make you feel bad. I just missed you, is all. I’m glad I found you again.”

Richie swallows thickly. “Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

The following week, Mike picks him up from his therapy appointment instead of Eddie. They’d talked about it beforehand, so it’s not a surprise, but he still feels disappointed to not have Eddie’s encouraging smile aimed at him when he leaves the building. 

He and Mike go out to lunch at a little sandwich place near his apartment, and Mike tells him all about all the places he’s seen since he finally left Derry. Richie finds that he likes to hear about all of his friend’s adventures. It’s refreshing to talk to someone who doesn’t seem to be tiptoeing around him. Mike’s been to Florida, finally, and Texas and Nevada and Washington. He’s got stories on stories about everywhere he’s been, and his smile as he remembers every amazing thing he’s done in his last year almost makes Richie forget about every shitty thing he’s done in his. 

He swallows the last of his water and leans back in his chair. He puts his hands in his pockets and regards Mike across the table. Mike copies his posture. 

“I hate to being down our day here because I’m actually having a really good time,” Richie starts, “but I have some amends to make with you as part of my AA steps.”

Mike nods solemnly. “I can’t think of anything you’d need to make amends with me for.”

“I can,” Richie says. “I blamed you for every bad thing that happened in Derry. I thought that the reason Eddie got hurt was because you brought us all back. I blamed you because it was easier than dealing with my own shit, and I shouldn’t have done that, and I shouldn’t have left Derry the way I did. I’m sorry.”

“I used to blame me, too,” Mike says conversationally, “and Bill. I blamed a lot of it on Bill for a long time.”

“What changed?” Richie asks. 

“I started therapy,” Mike says candidly. “It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?”

Richie chuckles. “It can be, yeah. I’m glad it worked out for you.”

“Still working out,” Mike says. “What happened to all of us isn’t something you just heal from. I’m sorry it got so bad for you and that we weren’t there to help you.”

“I keep telling people that I didn’t want help,” Richie says exasperatedly. “I cut myself off because I didn’t want help. I didn’t even give you guys the chance, so I don’t know why everyone feels sorry.”

“Because it says something about us that you didn’t think you could trust us with whatever you were going through,” Mike explains. 

“No, it says something about me. It says that I couldn’t trust the people who mattered most. It was always a me problem,” Richie says. Mike shakes his head. 

“I don’t think you can own all of it, Richie. We all made mistakes,” he says gently, and Richie only sort of believes him and wonders what it says about him. 

“Not Eddie,” Richie mumbles. Mike considers, his head tilting side to side as he thinks. 

“Eddie made some mistakes too,” Mike says mysteriously. Richie squints at him. 

“You’re doing that vague thing,” he accuses, “that thing you did to get us all to go to Derry. The thing where you’re not saying everything.”

“You should talk to Eddie,” Mike says gently. “When you’re ready.”

A week later, he visits Bill on the set of the new movie he’s working on. Richie’s read the book that it’s based on, and he likes it. He read it when he was at St. Anthony’s. He’d actually read all of Bill’s books when he was there, but he doesn’t tell him that. Bill enthusiastically shows him around the set that they’re currently working on and introduces him to his wife. Audra is so very not Bill’s type that it’s a little shocking, but he does seem to really love her, so he doesn’t mention it. She actually recognizes him from one of his old comedy specials, and it turns out that they have a few mutual acquaintances from old acting classes. 

They go out to dinner and he orders a steak. He makes a joke about Bill letting him cut his own meat, which makes Audra uncomfortable but makes Bill laugh. Bill is easy to be around, and Richie feels comfortable the whole night. Audra has an idea that he could get a part in the movie they’re working on, and Bill is very enthusiastic about the idea and immediately texts the director despite Richie’s protests. 

“I’m not sure I’m up to being back to work quite yet,” he admits, “and I’ve never really done any acting. Stand up was really my whole gig, you know, and I wasn’t even good enough at that to be able to write my own jokes.”

“I’m po-positive that you could write your own jokes, Richie,” Bill says. 

“Yeah, well. You’ve always had a lot more confidence in all of us than we’ve had in ourselves,” Richie says. Bill chuckles. 

“You’re funny, Richie. Maybe you should try writing while you’re home sometimes. Put together some material, get back on your feet. If I can learn to write an ending, you can learn to write your own jokes,” Bill says. Audra laughs. 

“I don’t have a manager or anything, though,” Richie protests. Bill shakes his head, but he’s still smiling. 

“Not now, maybe, but you have friends in the industry who can help you find someone,” he says. 

“You’d pull strings for me?” Richie asks, surprised. 

“Of course I would. You’re my be-best friend,” Bill says. 

They drop off Audra and Bill drives Richie back to his apartment. On the way, Richie does his making amends thing. 

“I’m sorry for the way I handled everything, after It,” he says. He drums his fingers on his knee anxiously. “I’m also... I’m also sorry that I didn’t trust you enough to understand you’d want to help me if you knew that I wasn’t okay.  
I’m starting to understand that you would’ve, and you wouldn’t have judged me or treated me any different.” 

“Thanks for saying that, Richie,” Bill says quietly. “I’m sorry too, you know.”

“No, this is my apologizing time. You wait your turn.”

“You’re already forgiven,” Bill laughs. “I am s-sorry, though. I heard about the show in Reno, and I should’ve tried harder to look you up after. we live in the same city, for Ch-Christ’s sake. I guess we both dropped the ball.”

“Yeah, well,” Richie hums. “I forgive you too, but I want to emphasize that this is my making amends time, not yours -“

“Beep beep, Richie,” Bill laughs. Richie smiles too. They drive in comfortable silence for a while. 

“Thanks, by the way,” he whispers eventually. 

“F-For what?”

“For calling Eddie when you found me at Saint Anthony’s,” Richie whispers. He fingers the pendant resting over his heart. “Thanks for... for knowing. You know, don’t you?”

Bill doesn’t say anything for a moment. He pulls up to the sidewalk in front of Richie’s building and puts the car in park. “If-If were talking about the same thing -“

“About me and Eds. Or, just about me. In relation to Eddie.”

“I just had an idea,” Bill says hesitantly. “I didn’t know for s-sure.”

“But you’ve always known us all the best,” Richie sighs. He scrubs a hand over his short hair. “When did you, like, start to know?”

“When we were kids, I guess,” Bill says. Richie shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I never knew, Richie, because you never told me. I-It’s not my place to s-say something like, ‘oh, I knew all along,’ because I don’t know anything until you tell me. It’s part of you, Richie, until you’re ready to share it with me or anyone else.”

Richie nods. “Can this be me telling you?”

“Yeah, yeah of course it can,” Bill says. “Thanks for telling me, Richie.”

“I can’t even say it out loud,” Richie says. He fiddles with his pendant anxiously. “I’m fucking forty. I’m too old to be doing this. It’s probably best if I don’t, right?”

“N-No, I don’t agree with that,” Bill says. “There’s no such thing as too old. You just do it when you’re ready. There’s no time frame for something like this.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I’ve done some research,” Bill says. Richie shifts uncomfortably. “I’ve learned a lot. Thanks for trusting this with me, Richie. Really.”

He leaves Bill and goes up to his apartment. He hopes Eddie is already there, but he doesn’t really know when to expect him to be back. He didn’t tell him what his plan for the afternoon was. He never really does, and Richie pretends that he doesn’t care that Eddie won’t tell him. 

He opens the door, and it’s the first time since they’ve been living together that he’s seen Eddie not totally put together. His hair is wet and he’s wearing his usual dad jeans, but he’s also wearing a button down shirt that’s completely open with nothing underneath. He looks comfortable, and he should, Richie thinks distantly, because he basically lives here now. But he can’t tear his eyes away from the knot of thick scar tissue that he’s never seen before. It’s baseball-sized and ugly, resting just under his sternum and slightly to the left. Richie feels tears well in his eyes. 

“Hey,” Eddie says. Richie hunches his shoulders and averts his eyes quickly. “How was dinner? Bill said he was going to take you to some fancy-ass place downtown, which, for the record, he never offered to take me to, just so you know.”

“Yeah, it was good,” Richie says roughly. He clears his throat. “Sorry, I - Sorry.”

“What’s going on, Richie?” Eddie asks. He pulls his shirt closed and starts doing the buttons up. 

“No, stop,” Richie says before he can think. He moves closer, his hand outstretched but trembling. “Is that - Is that it?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says awkwardly. He hesitates, then unbuttons the shirt and pulls it to the side so Richie can see. “Looks the same on my back. Not very pretty, huh? Sorry, man, I was just getting out of the shower and didn’t expect you to be home so soon.” He sighs, “Sorry, Rich. Rough day.”

“What happened?” Richie asks. “You wanna talk about it?”

“Nah, it’s okay. Just therapy, you know how it goes. Some sessions are easier than others,” Eddie says. Richie blinks at him. 

“You go to therapy?” He asks dumbly. 

Eddie laughs. “Of course, dipshit. I’m pretty sure we’re all in therapy. That’s where I go every Thursday afternoon. You didn’t know that?”

“I guess I didn’t,” Richie confesses. “I should have asked. Sorry I’m a shitty friend.”

“You’re not a shitty friend. I didn’t mean to keep it a s-“ Eddie pauses. “I didn’t mean to not tell you. I just figured you knew.”

“Mike told me he was in therapy,” Richie says absently. His mind is reeling. “I guess I thought I was the only crazy one in our group. You guys are trying to steal my thunder.”

“You’re not crazy,” Eddie says immediately. “None of us are. I needed a lot of help, after Derry. I was in the hospital for a really long time. They thought I’d never walk again, for a while. I was alive, but I felt like my life was still over. I got really depressed, and I started to think... I started to think it would have been better if you’d just left me down there to die, and I kept having these dreams,” he trails off. 

“What kind of dreams?” Richie asks. 

“About the clown, mostly. And sometimes I would have this dream where... it was like I was floating away, you know? Like I didn’t exist really anywhere, but there was this voice that sounded like...” Eddie swallows. “And the voice would say, ‘don’t leave me,’ but it didn’t make sense because the person who said it was the one who was gone. I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it, just... So I started therapy, and then I started to get better mentally and physically too. They said it was a miracle that I survived with no real complications the way I did. But therapy is good, so I still go. My doctor from back in New York actually recommended the guy who I see here in LA.”

Richie’s mouth is so dry that his tongue feels like a shriveled up snail in his mouth. He remembers being at Eddie’s bedside, begging him not to die, and then he just abandoned him. He realizes his fingers are close to touching the scar and he snaps his hand away, hiding it in his pocket. 

“I’m sorry, you know,” he says. “That I wasn’t there.”

“I know, Richie. We already talked about this, and it’s okay,” Eddie says. He buttons up his shirt, hiding the scar. 

“I wish I could be brave, like you guys,” Richie says before he can stop himself. Eddie looks at him curiously. 

“You tried to start a rock war with a killer clown the size of a house,” Eddie says flatly. Richie barks a laugh. 

“I just mean, like, you guys all got your shit together so fast, after,” he says. “And I just... I just ran away and tried to hide. I should’ve been brave like you guys, but I’ve never... I’ve never been brave. I’ve always been hiding.”

“Why is that, you think?” Eddie asks. 

“I don’t know. Maybe you rubbed off on me with all that talk about catching diseases,” Richie jokes. 

“You saying you thought you’d catch something from one of us?” Eddie asks. 

“No. More like the other way around, I guess, maybe,” Richie mumbles. 

“Don’t worry, Richie. If being an annoying asshole was contagious, we all would’ve caught it way before last year,” Eddie jokes. 

“Oh, ha ha,” Richie fake laughs, rolling his eyes. Eddie claps him on the shoulder. He flinches away. “Germs, Eds,” he mumbles, shoving his hands in his pockets. 

“Since when are you the germaphobe?” Eddie asks. Richie shrugs. 

“Just looking out for you, man,” he says. Eddie reaches for him again, and he takes a step back. 

“You don’t have anything I can catch, dipshit,” Eddie scoffs. He squeezes Richie’s shoulder. Richie tries to shrug him off, but he tightens his hold. 

“Stop it, man,” he says. Eddie holds his shoulders in his hands and tries to catch his eyes, but he looks resolutely down at the floor. “Come on. Let go.”

“I can’t catch anything from you because you’re not sick, Richie,” Eddie says firmly. He drags Richie toward him and wraps him up in a hug. Richie holds himself still and stiff, his hands out and away from Eddie’s body. He can feel Eddie’s hands on his back. He wonders if his friend can feel him shaking. He feels like he’s going to vibrate out of his own skin. The itch crawls up his throat. 

“You don’t know,” Richie whispers. 

“I know I’m hugging you, dickwad. Hug me back,” Eddie grumbles. Richie can see his hands shaking over Eddie’s shoulder. 

“I... I can’t,” he says. Eddie presses their cheeks together. Eddie’s stubble scratches gently against his jaw and makes him flinch. 

“You’re not sick,” Eddie repeats firmly. He pulls away, finally, but holds Richie’s shoulders again. “Look at me, Richie. You’re not sick.”

“I’m -“ Richie bites down hard on the inside of his cheek and tastes blood. 

“Richie -“

“I’m g- Eds, I’m -“ he chokes on the words. He shakes his head and tries again to pull away. 

Eddie cups his cheeks in his hands and forces him to make eye contact. He stares intently into his eyes. Richie takes in the furrow of his brow, the creases around his mouth, and he doesn’t think he can say it. Eddie gives him a little shake and a little smile. Richie feels his face crumble. He squeezes his eyes shut and lets the tears come. 

“I’m gay,” he whimpers. He raises his trembling hands and touches Eddie’s wrists with his fingertips. He sucks in a gasping breath and pulls his hands away, clutching them to his chest instead. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Eds.”

He expects Eddie to withdraw, to run away from him and into the kitchen so he can wash his hands. He expects Eddie to be as disgusted with him as he is with himself. Eddie doesn’t pull away. He cradles the back of Richie’s head with one hand and pulls him back in. Richie presses his mouth against Eddie’s shoulder and sobs. He still doesn’t know what to do with his hands. 

“You don’t have to be sorry, Richie,” Eddie whispers. His free hand rubs up and down Richie’s back comfortingly, the other one warm and strong on the back of his head, keeping him close. “You’re not sick, Richie. You’re okay. Hug me back, you fucking idiot, I’m comforting you.”

He clutches at Eddie’s shoulders and opens up the floodgates. He wails and cries and apologizes, but Eddie just shushed him and tells him he doesn’t have to be sorry at all. 

They end up on the couch, Eddie’s arm heavy and solid around his shoulders, their legs pressed together. He tells Eddie how he knew since he was a kid and it made him so afraid all the time. He tells Eddie about the itch and the fear, and how it all felt like it went away when he first went back to Derry, and that scared him even more. 

“It made it more real,” he says. He swipes at his tears with his sleeve. “Like, seeing you again made me feel like I wasn’t afraid for the first time, and that scared me because it meant it was really true, you know?”

“You got scared because you weren’t scared?” Eddie asks. 

“It sounds stupid when you say it like that,” Richie complains. Eddie laughs. “It was you, Eds. It’s always been you, who...” he looks up at his friend and smiles painfully. “Ever since we were kids. It was always you.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything for a minute. It takes Richie a moment to realize he’s crying, too. He opens his mouth to apologize, but snaps it shut when Eddie cups his jaw in his hand. 

“It was always you, too, Richie,” he says gently. His thumb rubs gentle circles on Richie’s cheek. Richie sobs. 

“We’re really fucking stupid, huh?” He weeps. Eddie laughs through his tears, too. 

Eddie leans in slowly and Richie’s first instinct it to jerk away, but he stays still. Eddie presses a gentle kiss to the corner of his mouth and he sighs, his tense shoulders relaxing despite himself. Eddie pulls away just far enough so he can search Richie’s face. 

It’s so foreign to him to be so close to anyone, let alone a man. A thrill of fear spikes in his chest, but he tamps it down. He feels okay, he thinks, being close. It doesn’t feel scary at all, actually, not in the way he always expected it to be. He doesn’t know how he got to that deep place of fear. He and Eddie were always tactile as children, sharing hammocks and play fighting and hugging. He doesn’t know how he let himself forget how to be touched. He went so long in his self-induced isolation that it almost feels wrong to be touched like he’s some precious thing, but he can already feel himself falling in love with the feeling. 

Eddie’s hand shifts against his cheek, drawing his attention back to the present. Richie meets his eyes and smiles. 

“No more itch,” he whispers. He reaches out to hold the back of Eddie’s neck and pull him in again.

Eddie kisses him. It’s chaste and sweet, and Richie wants to stay right there, in that moment with Eddie, for the rest of his life. He tells him so. 

“Okay,” Eddie says quietly, his breath hot against Richie’s mouth. “Then we will.”

“But like, we can get off the couch eventually, right?” Richie says after a beat. 

“You were the one who wanted to stay with me in this moment forever.”

“Yeah, but I have a bad back, Eds, and you’re the only one short enough to comfortably sleep on the love seat anyway, so -“

“Shut up, Richie.”

“It was staying in the metaphorical moment,” Richie laughs. They both still have tears on their faces. Eddie pulls his hand away to wipe his face and Richie misses it immediately. “Staying with you, like, forever. It sounds so good.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Eddie promises, and Richie believes him.


	5. Daylight

At the end of the September, Richie and Eddie move out of Richie’s apartment and into their own place. Richie’s apartment had been nice, and it had been big enough for the two of them, but it was wrought with bad memories and it was also just Richie’s even though Eddie had moved in. They spend a considerable amount of time apartment hunting and even look at a few tiny houses before settling on a two bedroom condo close to where Bill and Audra live. 

They use the master bedroom as their official bedroom and leave the second bedroom just for storage. At Richie’s old place, they would sometimes sleep together in Richie’s bed, but not every night. Richie is still working on accepting the fact that Eddie not only loves him, he actually likes him, and he likes being with him all the time. He still sometimes thinks that he’s smothering Eddie too much, but he seems to be the only one who thinks that, so he doesn’t mention it much. He likes sleeping with Eddie, anyway, so it feels like it works out mostly in his favor. 

Bill, true to his word, sets him up with a new agent. He’s still friendly with Jason, but there’s too much personal history between them now for them to ever have a professional relationship again. He knows Jason will never consider taking him back on, so he trusts Bill when he introduces him to Conrad. Conrad is friendly and encourages him to try to write his own material, so he tries it. It’s slow-going and hard work, so enrolls in a comedy class and joins an improv troupe. He gets recognized a lot in the class and the club because of his old success, and it makes him nervous because they all probably also know that he completely lost his marbles six months before. 

Doctor A says he’s making a lot of good progress. They decide to bump up his dosage on his antidepressant and start him on a low dose of an anti-anxiety med on top of that after the first two weeks of his improv group because he keeps panicking when he has to get in front of the group to perform. He goes home with his new prescription and feels a little defeated. It feels like a step back and not like progress at all. Eddie just hugs him and tells him that he’s been on anti-anxiety medication for years, since even before they all returned to Derry. Richie hugs him back and presses a kiss to his cheek because he can. Eddie smiles at him, and he admires the deep like around his mouth. 

“I love you,” he says, also because he can. It feels good to say. Eddie smiles up at him and pecks him on the lips. 

“I love you, too,” he says.

After a few weeks, when Richie feels comfortable participating in improv class and has written a fair few decent jokes for a potential routine, he goes back to see Dr. A again to talk about how the meds are working. He feels pretty good during this session; he feels better than he has in a long time, like he has a future that has things worth sticking around to see. It’s true, he thinks, as he relays this information to his doctor. He has Eddie, who he loves and who loves him. He has Bev and Ben, who he FaceTimes at least once per week so that he can stay up to date on all of their latest wedding plans. He has Mike, who’s all over the world but always answers his emails promptly. He has Bill, who lives within walking distance and who he and Eddie have dinner with on Sunday nights. This is what Dr. A calls a support system, and he has it. It’s something he never thought he’d have, and yet he sees himself overflowing with it. He tries not to spend too much time thinking about it because he worries that if he dwells too long in how good things are, they’ll turn bad again. 

“Yeah, I just feel good, I guess. Like I’m finally all evened out,” he explains. 

“That’s good to hear, Richie,” Dr. A says, and he’s smiling. 

“I never really thought about my future that much, growing up,” he says. Because when I was a kid I thought I would be murdered by a clown, he doesn’t say. “I sort of feel like I’m starting my life, but it feels too late to be starting, you know what I mean?”

“It isn’t too late to do anything,” Dr. A says. “There’s no timeline for living your life. You just live it as best you can. You only get this one chance. Don’t waste it.”

“I won’t,” he says. “I’m gonna try not to.”

Dr. A walks him to the door like he always does at the end of their sessions. They chit chat a little, just easy stuff. Richie thinks that if Dr. A didn’t know every aspect of his deepest, darkest secrets, they might be friends. 

“So what’s your plan for the rest of the day?” Dr. A asks, and Richie knows he’s actually interested. It’s a nice feeling, to talk to people who actually care to know what he’s saying. He spent so many years just talking to fill up space, having no one really listen. It’s nice to be listened to. 

“Eddie’s picking me up, and we’re meeting Bill and Audra at the beach,” Richie says. It’s not his favorite idea. He knows Eddie isn’t totally on board either. They both have scars they’d rather not show the world. He’s pretty sure he can convince everyone to just stick to the boardwalk, though. 

“And when are you seeing Mike next?” 

“Not sure, Doc. He’s off to Alaska for some unknown goddamn reason. I heard there are swarms of bugs the size of a Nissan up there. Not to mention the vampires,” Richie says, and Dr. A laughs. “He’s gonna FaceTime tonight though, with Bev and Ben. As long as he doesn’t, you know, get attacked by some handsome rando and start sparkling, I guess.”

“So you’ll all be together,” Dr. A clarifies. 

“Yeah, all of us who are left,” Richie corrects. It’s still hard to talk about Stan. Dr. A doesn’t push even though Richie knows he wants to. He’s a good guy like that. 

“Then it looks like I was right after all,” Dr. A says as they reach the door. Richie shakes his head. He can see Eddie waiting, parked in his usual spot by the curb. 

“Right about what? I mean, I agree, because you’ve literally never been wrong about me before, but clarifying would be helpful,” he says. 

“About the medal I gave you,” Dr. A explains. 

Richie pulls it out from under his shirt. He never takes it off. It has started to feel like a kind of safety. “This thing? You said I didn’t need it when you gave it to me. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yes,” his doctor says. “And it looks like I was right.”

“You know I’m not college educated. Is there a riddle in there somewhere?” 

“Saint Anthony. Haven’t you wondered why this place is named after him?” Dr. A asks. 

“Uh,” Richie says dumbly. Eddie’s seen them now. He waves and Richie waves back. “No. I guess not.”

Dr. A smiles. “I’ll see you next week, Richie.”

He pulls out his phone and googles Saint Anthony on his way to the car. He sees several pictures of the image that’s printed on his pendant. He scrolls down and reads the short description. He’s halfway to the car, but he stops and spins on his heel. Dr. A is still in the doorway, watching him. 

“Patron saint of lost things,” he shouts toward him. “What does that mean?”

“We’ll talk more next week,” Dr. A calls back, and he waves goodbye. Richie gets into the car and accepts a kiss from his boyfriend. 

They’ll talk more, but Richie thinks he figures it out of the drive to the boardwalk. Eddie’s hand is in his during the drive, and Bill lights up with a smile as soon as they pull into the parking spot next to his car. He thinks about Bev and Ben and Mike. He touches the pendant and thinks Dr. A was right. He doesn’t really need it. Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things, but Richie is not lost. He’s right where he should be, with the people he loves the most. 

He’s still a little skittish holding hands in public with Eddie. He loves Eddie, but he’s been in the closet for his whole life. Eddie is less worried, but he also doesn’t press the matter. It’s not that they aren’t affectionate. They hug and rib each other. He feels like he’s learning how to be his old self again, and he even ends up mussing Eddie’s perfectly styled hair at one point despite his screeching protests. He tries and fails to hide his laugh when Eddie calls him a fucking asshole and people start to stare and give them a wide berth. Eddie’s fuming, but he lets Richie at least attempt to put his hair back into some semblance of order. 

Later, when the sun starts to go down, he stops to buy a drink and ends up buying two vanilla ice cream cones. He hands one to Eddie without thinking. Eddie smiles warmly up at him and drops a quick kiss on his shoulder in thanks. It sends a thrill through Richie’s chest, and he wishes he was brave enough to just kiss him right there in front of God and everyone. He thinks he might be, someday. 

His favorite part about living with Eddie and being with Eddie is that they share a bed. Richie doesn’t sleep well, but when he wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, he can just press his ear to Eddie’s warm chest. He can feel the warmth of his skin, smell his sweat and the tang of his body wash, but the best part is when he can just rest his head against Eddie’s breastbone and hear and feel the thump-thump-thump of his beating heart. It’s his favorite sound. 

Conrad convinces him to do a couple of open mic nights to test out his new material. At the end of October, he does a small set at a little bar. They don’t advertise it, but word gets around, and the bar manager ends up having to turn people away at the door. It makes him anxious. It’s nowhere near the number of people he used to do stand up for, but he’s just getting his feet wet again, and he’s pretty much convinced that he’s going to bomb again. Conrad tells him that the people who came to see him are his fans, and they’re happy to have him back. Richie just thinks they’re here to watch him fail. 

He doesn’t fail. He doesn’t do any of his old jokes because he doesn’t want to perform anything he doesn’t write himself anymore. He just wants to talk about things he really knows. He talks about his friends and reconnecting with them after twenty seven years. His Bill Denbrough impression kills. He talks about therapy and jokes about his breakdown. He gets a lot of laughs, and he makes himself laugh, too. It’s easier every day to laugh at himself. He doesn’t talk about Eddie. Overall, he feels good at the end of the night. Eddie, who’d watched the whole thing from side stage, tells him he’s great. 

The next few weeks are not as easy. 

It starts with good news. Conrad had invited some industry people to his show, and they’d been very impressed. Check meets with them and with Conrad a few days after the show. They throw around words like “comeback” and “tour” and “Netflix special.” It all feels very overwhelming, and Richie has to excuse himself for a few minutes so he can catch his breath and run his hands under cold water. By the end of the day, they’ve all agreed that he needs to write more jokes to complete his set, and he and Conrad have a contract to look over. 

Eventually, and with support and advice from Dr. A and Eddie and Conrad and his lawyer, he signs the contract from Netflix agreeing to film a comeback special that will be featured on their streaming platform. It’s scary and thrilling to think about. He doesn’t know if he really qualifies for a comeback when it’s been less than a year since his breakdown, but it’s in his lap and he owns it. He just needs to finish writing the set by December, because they want to film in January. It’s fast-tracked, but it feels good. It feels optimistic. It makes Eddie proud. He wears that deep-dimpled smile all night when they go to dinner to celebrate, and he wears it later when they’re fooling around before bed, too. 

Because news travels the way it does on social media, the general public starts to get wind of his new show before its announced. When it is officially announced, at the end of the week, Richie is glad he doesn’t have social media. He’s sure that Conrad is right, like he was right about the people who went to his first show getting back on his feet, and that a lot of people are happy that he’s back at it. He also knows that people on the internet can be very mean and judgmental, so he’s glad that he doesn’t have anything but his untouched Instagram that he never looks at to gather criticism. 

The day of the announcement, after the congratulatory messages have poured in and the criticism has been ignored, some photos of him and Eddie start spreading around. Eddie sees them first, but Conrad calls him not long after to let them both know. They’re photos from that day at the pier with Bill and Audra. There’s one of him and Eddie with ice cream, mid-conversation. The other shows them again, with Eddie’s lips on his shoulder and his head ducked to lean against Eddie’s. 

It sends him into a tailspin. He doesn’t leave the house for days even though he definitely has real life things he needs to handle. He spends most of the days and nights hiding in bed while Eddie talks to Conrad and Dr. A and Bev on the phone. He does the all the breathing and grounding exercises he’s practiced with Dr. A, but he feels like he’s right back to square one with how scared he feels. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to leave the house again, not when he could be walking down the street and everyone would just know about him. 

When Eddie crawls into bed next to him, he just lets himself be held while trying to come up with some way to make himself feel like his whole life isn’t falling apart all over again. He lets Eddie be the big spoon, holding his hands against his chest so he can feel his own heartbeat and kissing the back of his neck until he can finally go to sleep, and Eddie is still there when the nightmares wake him up, and it’s enough for him to feel like he isn’t completely broken at the seams all over again. 

It happens like this:

He has a Netflix special to be filmed in a few short months. He’s all but outed to the entire world mere hours later, but he remembers back to what Bill had said. Bill said that no one can truly know until he tells them, and, since he didn’t tell them, no one really knows. That halfway helps. He also knows, deep down, that this is something he has to own for himself. He has to be the one to say it to the world. He’s done letting people tell his story for him, so he logs on to his abandoned Instagram and has Eddie help him make a post. 

The picture is the paparazzi watermarked photo of Eddie dropping a kiss onto his shoulder. The caption reads: “I guess the cat is out of the bag. Not that I’ve ever been interested in pussy.”

He gets invited to a few talk shows after that. He goes on Ellen and Conan, and then he calls it quits on the televised stuff. There’s only so many times he needs to tell public access television that he’s a big gay homosexual. Both hosts shower him in praise and tell him how great and important it is that he talk about it publicly. He does a few interviews for magazines, but otherwise he just tries to lay as low as he can now that the entire world knows he’s as gay as the day is long. 

Eddie has Twitter. Eddie says that a lot of the talk is overwhelmingly positive. His fans are celebrating his coming out, calling him brave. They like to see the representation. 

“I can’t represent a whole group of people,” Richie frets. “I couldn’t even say it about myself until like three months ago. I’m not a face of anything.” 

“You don’t have to be the face of the whole LGBTQ+ community,” Eddie says. He lets Eddie wrap him up in his arms. It’s his favorite place to be, his head tucked up under Eddie’s chin. “Representation does matter, though. You can just be you and you inspire people. You inspire me every day.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true, asshole,” Eddie says. Richie ducks his head and hides his face against Eddie’s neck. “You’re so strong. I remember once that you told me I’m braver than I think. I think you don’t give yourself enough credit. You’re braver than you think, too.” 

The next day, Richie is restless. He feels like he could crawl out of his own skin. He’s trending on Twitter and some of his old routines are floating around on Reddit. He tries to watch a movie with Eddie, but he can’t focus. His whole body is thrumming and he can’t get the song out of his head. _ I know your secret! Your dirty little secret! _ But it’s not a secret anymore. That might be the scariest part. 

“Let’s get a dog,” he says. Eddie turns to him, surprised. 

“What?”

“Let’s get a dog,” Richie says again. “Let’s go down to the SPCA or whatever right now and get a dog. You like dogs.”

“I do like dogs,” Eddie says carefully. “What’s bringing this on, exactly?”

“I can’t think about Twitter or Instagram or anything anymore. I have to be busy. Puppies keep people busy, right? They’re a lot of work.”

“They are a lot of work,” Eddie agrees. 

“Then it’s perfect. We can get one, and I can take care of it. I’ll feed it and wash it and take it out for poops. Please, mom.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but they end up at the animal shelter not half an hour later, peering at puppies through a glass wall. They steer clear of any and all small dogs. Richie falls head over heels for a one year old German Shepherd, and Eddie falls for him too, as soon as he sees how bizarrely oversized and cute he looks in Richie’s lap on the floor of the puppy play room. 

“Let’s name him Cat,” Richie says, ruffling the fur up and down their new dog’s back. 

“We are not naming him Cat. He does not need to have an identity complex,” Eddie complains. 

“You’re right, I’ve got that covered for all of us. How about Spit?”

“Spit is not a name.”

“It can be, if we name him Spit.”

They end up calling him Batman, which is as good a name as any for a dog. He’s cute, and he definitely doesn’t listen when Eddie tells him that under no uncertain circumstance is he allowed to sleep in the bed with them. Richie wakes every morning with Batman curled his feet, and he thinks it’s the best thing ever. 

He spends Thanksgiving with all of the Losers at Bill’s house. They toast to Stan, and they take turns telling their favorite stories about him and about each other from when they were kids. They tell each other what they’re thankful for, and Richie makes himself shyly tell them all that he’s thankful that he’s still alive, and then he lets himself be buried in hugs for a good five minutes before he reminds everyone that the bird’s going to get cold if they don’t start digging in. That evening, he posts two pictures to his neglected Instagram. The first is a picture of all of the Losers at the dinner table, taken by Audra. The second is a photo of himself and Eddie, curled together on the overstuffed recliner in Bill’s living room with Batman asleep in their lap. Eddie’s face is hidden in Richie’s neck, and Richie’s own face is relaxed and smiling. He looks content, he thinks, because he is. He captions the post, ‘Happy Thanksgiving from my family to yours.’ Then he turns his phone off and focuses on the people mean the most to him in the entire world. 

In December, he finishes writing his show. It’s approved by the Netflix people, and tickets go on sale that month for a live taping of the special in January. It sells out in a day, and Richie almost can’t believe it.

“People love you,” Eddie tells him. He kisses him hard. 

“Not as much as you love me, right?” he asks. Eddie smiles against his mouth. 

“No one could ever love you as much as I love you, dumbass,” he says. 

They spend Christmas Eve getting all too rowdy at a Chinese restaurant in LA. The whole group of them attends, and none of them has a drop of alcohol, and it’s the most fun Richie can remember having in a long time. Richie almost feels bad that everyone keeps having to travel to the west coast to visit, but he and Eddie have plans to visit Boston and stay near where Beverly and Ben have settled down for the New Year, so he tries not to dwell on it and just enjoy his night. 

When they get home, he and Eddie make love for the first time. They’ve fooled around enough that their bodies are all too familiar with each other, but Eddie has been almost infuriatingly patient with Richie as he works toward being open and accepting of his own body in relation to another man’s. It’s weird and awkward and a little messy and a little imperfect, but he goes to sleep that night with his head on Eddie’s chest, with the sound of his thump-thump-thumping heart in his head, and he thinks he might be okay. 

He wakes up on Christmas morning with his boyfriend in his arms. For one magical, fleeting moment, they are the only people who exist in the entire world, and they are together, and they are in love. Then Batman jumps onto the bed and wakes Eddie up, so they get out of bed to make French toast and open presents. 

They sit cross-legged next to each other on the floor in front of their miniature Christmas tree. Eddie hands Richie a box wrapped meticulously in silver and green striped paper. Richie shakes it mockingly next to his ear. 

“Well, we already have a puppy,” he jokes. Eddie rolls his eyes and shoves at him until he tears the paper away and opens the box. 

Inside is a leather jacket with a soft cloth collar. It looks both new and comfortingly worn at the same time. To Richie, looking into the box feels like looking into the past. He touches the soft leather with his fingertips and then has to force himself to look up at Eddie, who is watching him quietly. 

Richie swallows hard. Eddie smiles. “I tried to get one as close to your old one as I could,” he explains. Richie nods. It looks just like his old leather jacket. “I’ve seen, like, a hundred pictures of you wearing that ratty old thing.”

It had been his favorite, he remembers. Warm, with soft, buttery leather and deep pockets. He’d had his hands in them more often than not. 

“It looks the same,” Richie whispers. 

“I did my best,” Eddie says. “I figured it was the least I could do, since...”

“Since my old one got left in some sewer in Derry?” Richie jokes. Eddie laughs. 

“Yeah, with my fucking blood and guts all over it,” he says. Richie elbows him, then kisses him. He pulls the jacket out of the box and holds it to his chest, presses his palm against the smooth leather until it warms under his hand. 

“Thank you,” he whispers. His eyes feel hot and wet, but he cant explain exactly why. It feels like the last part of himself that he lost has been returned to him. 

Richie gives Eddie a ring, and then it’s Eddie’s turn to cry. 

“It’s something I’ve always wanted,” Richie explains quietly. Eddie looks so quickly from the ring in his finger to Richie’s face, and back and forth and back again, that Richie isn’t sure which he really wants to see more. It’s just a plain silver band with ‘R + E’ engraved on the inside, but it’s exactly what he’d always pictured. “To have you by my side. Forever. Even when I didn’t remember Derry, I always knew something was missing. It was you, Eds.”

“Richie,” Eddie whispers. He’s been silently crying since he opened the tiny blue velvet box. 

“I carved our initials into the kissing bridge, you know. When I was thirteen. My whole life, I just thought... no matter what happened, I’d be okay if you were with me. Even if you don’t want to get married,” Richie says quickly, his heart hammering, “I want you to keep the ring. So you know. No matter what, it was always you.”

“You’re so stupid,” Eddie says, and then kisses him more soundly than he’s ever been kissed before. With Eddie’s hand in his hair and Eddie’s lips on his, he feels at home. 

When they finally break apart to breathe, Richie says, “So does that mean you do want to marry me, or -?” And then he and Eddie make love again, right there in front of God and the Christmas tree. 

The special films in January and is released in early February. He does his same jokes about his friends and his mental health, and he also tells a fair few jokes about how it feels impossible to learn how to navigate modern gay culture as a newly un-closeted forty year old man in the year 2018. It gets rave reviews, and he’s lauded in the media as a comeback kid. 

He feels proud of himself for being so candid in his show. All of his friends were there for the taping, and they all tell him how funny he still is. Bev praises him for his honesty. He gets hugs from  
Bill and Ben and Bev and Mike and even Audra. It feels like he’s done something momentous, with the way that his heart beats so fast, but not in an anxious way. He feels good. He feels loved. 

They don’t cheers to celebrate, but they do go out for ice cream, and it’s a dream come true. He sits, squeezed between Eddie and Mike on a cheap plastic booth, a vanilla ice cream cone in his hand, and marvels at how far he’s come. He feels better than he had in his entire life, and he kisses Eddie right there, in front of their friends and an ice cream parlor full of strangers and God Himself, and he feels good. 

Beverly and Ben get married on Valentines Day, under an arch of roses and daises. They kiss as the sun sets pink and gold behind them, with just the Losers and some of their close friends and coworkers there to witness. They all dance under the big white canopy, sprinkled in the light from the stars and the fairy lights that Eddie had meticulously strung up from the rafters. Richie thinks life feels pretty good. He tells Eddie so as they sway gently together to a pretty tune that neither of them know. 

“My life feels pretty good, too,” Eddie whispers, and he kisses him. He can feel the cool band of Eddie’s ring against his own finger where their hands are intertwined. 

“I’m so glad I’m around to see it,” Richie whispers. 

“Me too,” Eddie says, and Richie knows that the rest of their lives together will be too beautiful for the books. 

“I’m the luckiest man in the world,” he tells Eddie. 

“Oh yeah? Luckier than me?” Eddie asks. He nods. 

“Yeah. Always luckier than you. I do get to kiss the second-most handsome guy in the room any time I want, after all,” he teases. 

“Second-most? After you?” Eddie asks, eyebrows raised. 

“No, after Ben.”

“Oh, well. That’s a given,” Eddie agrees. 

Richie gives him a watery smile. “We’re going to be perfect, you know. The perfect life together, just you and me,” he whispers.

“Oh yeah? How do you figure?” Eddie asks. Richie kisses the corner of his mouth gently, then pulls him in close so he can rest his cheek against Eddie’s. 

“Because I believe we will,” he whispers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End :)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. Your support means more than you know <3


End file.
